Sport and Challenges to Racism (Global Culture and Sport)

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Sport and Challenges to Racism

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Global Culture and Sport Series Editors: Stephen Wagg and David Andrews Titles include:


John Harris RUGBY UNION AND GLOBALIZATION An Odd-Shaped World Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen (editors) SPORT AND CHALLENGES TO RACISM Roger Levermore and Aaron Beacom (editors) SPORT AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Pirkko Markula (editor) OLYMPIC WOMEN AND THE MEDIA International Perspectives

Global Culture and Sport Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–57818–0 hardback 978–0–230–57819–7 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Sport and Challenges to Racism Edited by

Jonathan Long Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

and

Karl Spracklen Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

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Selection and editorial matter © Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen 2011 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2011 Foreword © Lord Herman Ouseley 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–23615–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sport and challenges to racism / edited by Jonathan Long, Karl Spracklen. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–23615–8 1. Racism in sports. 2. Discrimination in sports. 3. Sports – Social aspects. I. Long, Jonathan (Jonathan A.) II. Spracklen, Karl. GV706.32.S724 2010 796.089—dc22

2010032631

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents vii

Foreword

viii

List of Contributors

xiii

Part I Introduction 1

Positioning Anti-Racism in Sport and Sport in Anti-Racism Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen

2

Thinking ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in (Dutch) Sports Policy and Research Jacco van Sterkenburg

Part II 3

3

19

Practices

‘In This Shrinking World’: ‘Race’, the Olympics and the Wind of Change Stephen Wagg

37

4

The Post-Apartheid Scenario in South Africa Sam Ramsamy

53

5

Using Charters and Standards to Promote Anti-Racism in Sport Karl Spracklen and Jonathan Long

67

6

‘What I Said was Racist – But I’m Not a Racist’: Anti-Racism and the White Sports/Media Complex Ben Carrington

7

83

Race Matters in Australian Sport Colin Tatz

100

Part III Identities 8

9 10

Natural-Born Athletes? Australian Aboriginal People and the Double-Edged Lure of Professional Sport Daryl Adair and Megan Stronach

117

Just a Dream? Structure, Power and Agency in Basketball Scott N. Brooks


Acknowledgements

135

Global Integration in the Nation: The Emergence of Non-White Athletes and Anti-Racist Initiatives in Norwegian Elite Sport Mette Andersson

150

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11

Contents

Gender and Cultural Diversity in Australian Sport Carmel Foley, Tracy Taylor and Hazel Maxwell

Part IV 12

Challenges

Marching Altogether? Football Fans Taking a Stand Against Racism Paul Thomas

13 It’s Not as Simple as Black and White: Challenging Racism in Professional Football through Locally Grounded Multi-agency Collaboration Steven Bradbury 14

167

Does Diversity in Sport Reduce Racial Prejudice? George B. Cunningham

185

199 214

15 Too Radical? Critical Race Theory and Sport Against Racism in Ireland Kevin Hylton

229

16

247

So What Has Changed (and What Has to Change)? Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen

Bibliography

257

Index

281


vi

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We want to thank the contributors contributing in this volume for sharing a belief that this was a project worth contributing to. We also reiterate our thanks to all our respondents who probably wondered why it was necessary to tell those researchers what to them was the bloody obvious. As with most of our work we have benefited from the support of colleagues at the Carnegie Research Institute. In particular, we much appreciate the production assistance provided by Sam Armitage, our research administrator.


Acknowledgements

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Challenging Racism in and through Sport: Masculinity, Power and Supremacy

Race, sex, class and power On the world stage of sport, such as the Olympics and Paralympics, there is apparent ethnic inclusiveness that suggests that there is greater opportunity for equal participation in competitive sporting events than in almost any other sphere of life. Of course, this is not so because of the unequal investment in individuals, resources and facilities for personal and professional development in all countries. Thus, inequality in access to sport exists irrespective of race and ethnicity in different parts of the world. Undoubtedly, social class is an issue prevailing in virtually all societies, limiting access to opportunities, even where such opportunities are available in abundance. Socio-economic disadvantages are inevitably compounded by race bias and prejudice. Multiple discrimination has also meant disadvantage and exclusion for many other groups of people such as the disabled, women and girls. When all these characteristics come into play the results can be severely disadvantaging. Race, class and sex are potent characteristics in the power play indulged by leaders, managers and administrators when making decisions. Negative and discriminatory outcomes and impact, whether unintended or deliberate are the usual experiences for people sharing those characteristics. The key factor in the challenge to eliminate discrimination, disadvantage, inequalities and exclusion is that of power and whose hands it is in when being exercised. The concept and effects of racism have to be understood by all those people in decision-making positions so that they can more readily comprehend the nature of racist stereotyping and labelling. Currently they seem to find it more difficult to understand the lethal underpinning of power in the hands of people who hold prejudices, bias and hatred of people from other racial groups. In the hands of people, who are prepared to challenge their prejudices and bias power can be used more constructively as they endeavour to avoid discriminatory outcomes. Even so, the result of their actions, through organisations not subjected to systemic reform to eradicate discriminatory


Foreword

viii

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ix

results, can still lead to disproportionate adverse outcomes for people not of the same race, sex or class. Essentially, the focus of concerns has to be on the structures and processes in organisations’ operations which, inevitably, lead to systemic institutional discriminatory results. Their policies and practices reflect and reinforce the prevailing culture and status quo of the decision-makers, thereby contributing to on-going exclusion and marginalisation of some groups of people. Governing bodies of sport are no different from institutions in other sectors. In Britain it would be rare, if not impossible, to find Black or Asian individuals in powerful decision-making positions in sporting bodies. This does not mean that there is overt racial discrimination, nor does it mean that the exclusion of women and people from the lower socio-economic strata of our society from the seats of power is due only to blatant sexism and exclusion. Nor does it mean that only white people can be racist, or men sexist or wealthy people the sole oppressors of the poor. What is undeniable, are the outcomes resulting from decisions made by those in power who, in spite of declared commitments to equal opportunities and fair treatment, uphold traditions, cultures, policies and practices which are insufficiently radical or robust to eliminate or mitigate the adverse effects of race, sex and class discrimination.

Individuals and institutions Nowadays, in the multi-dimensional and diverse UK (and many other countries) there are new and emergent forms of racisms to confront, as this book highlights. It is vital that we should consider not just racist individuals, but also examine the inequities that may be generated by the structures of institutions. Institutional racism occurs when organisations’ policies and practices systemically and disproportionately reinforce negative outcomes for disadvantaged racial groups. In trying to tackle racism, inequalities and exclusion in Britain’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society, the approach nowadays embraces concepts described as diversity (targeting all disadvantaged groups of people whatever their backgrounds or circumstances) and community cohesion, aimed at bringing people of all backgrounds together to overcome suspicions, prejudices and separatism and to increase participation in mainstream society. While such approaches are laudable, understandable and supportable, they are designed carefully to avoid use of the harsh terminology associated with ‘race’ and racism for fear of being accused of being ‘politically correct’, which itself is a label that some in officialdom are anxious to avoid. It cannot be stressed too often that challenging and tackling race, racism, sexism and class related discrimination has to be understood and confronted head-on if real change is to occur within years rather than decades. There


Challenging Racism in and through Sport

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Herman Ouseley

has been race equality legislation in the UK since 1965 aimed at eliminating unlawful racial discrimination. Forty-five years later, there is less overt racial discrimination but racism exists in subtler forms and is much harder to eliminate because of all the other soft and comfortable diversionary policy approaches. Some of the earliest manifestations of racism can be linked to colonialism and slavery in previous centuries and, to some extent, this is ongoing in contemporary forms of human trafficking. One of the earliest high profile examples of racism in sport was the treatment of Jessie Owens at the Berlin Olympic Games. For a black man to be so triumphantly successful in such a hostile and hate-filled environment was both a tribute to the fortitude, bravery and sporting prowess of Owens and a slap in the face for Adolph Hitler’s Nazis. It was a demonstration of how an individual’s athleticism in the sporting arena of fair and fierce competition could triumph over stateinspired hatred, prejudice and bigotry. Other notable Black sporting figures who overcame such formidable barriers include the boxers Jack Johnson and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali). Not only were they supreme competitors, they dared to take on the white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan and the hate mongers. While overcoming most barriers thrown at them, including periods of imprisonment they also captivated and gained the support and admiration of the anti-establishment lobby and those concerned with social justice. Perhaps the most obvious expression of race hate in sport has been reflected in football. Over the years, as Black footballers have appeared on the field of play, they have been verbally and physically abused. From the early twentieth century days of Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull, through to Clyde Best and Ade Coker in the early 1960s, there was a fascination with their presence and an undercurrent of exoticism and novelty. Football itself was not the problem. It was the personal prejudices that other footballers and football fans brought with them that would influence treatment and behaviour. As more Black players emerged into the professional game, the novelty of the exoticism associated with their skin colour began to wane as mythology grew about their capabilities to withstand and flourish in the physically demanding environment of a British football season, especially in a harsh winter. Increasingly, in the wider society, there were growing mediainspired fears about ‘coloured immigration’ to Britain and race attacks and harassment became a familiar part of the landscape as a form of domestic terrorism being inflicted on Black and Asian households. Extreme political movements, such as the National Front used their influence to whip up race hatred during the 1980s and even began to infiltrate football on an organised basis to harass and abuse Black players and Black supporters. Such racialism was visible not only in the professional game but in local parks, in the amateur game and even at school-boy (not girls) level.


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xi

By the early 1990s, the situation had become so intolerable that Black and Asian fans would avoid going to games as spectators and the Black players would face a torrent of race-hate abuse each game, much from supporters of their own club! By 1993, some attempts had been made to highlight the need to combat racial abuse and harassment. These were welcome, albeit piecemeal and tokenistic. An initial breakthrough came later that year when the then Commission for Racial Equality and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) jointly launched a campaign to “Kick Racism out of Football”, encouraging all 92 professional clubs in England and Wales to adopt a ten point plan of modest activity to tackle the problem. Initially, there was a reluctance by authorities such as the Football Association (FA) and the Football League to accept that there was a serious problem requiring urgent comprehensive action but, grudgingly later on, they agreed to join the campaign. Within a few years the Kick It Out (KIO) organisation emerged with the main sponsors being the PFA, the FA, the Premier League and the Football Foundation and supported by the Football League, League Managers Association, Referees and Match Officials Association, the police and a whole range of other associated bodies, including the football supporters federations and groupings. In the ensuing years, Kick It Out, with the football authorities, including the professional clubs, the police and both central and local government combined their efforts to challenge, outlaw and rid the game of unacceptable behaviour. So successful has the campaign been to date in addressing racism that there are now concerted efforts being made to improve the quality of access and inclusion for women and girls, disabled people and also to challenge all forms of homophobic, anti-semitic and Islamaphobic behaviour. With such widespread support and overt actions, the problem of racial abuse is now manageable and fans are aware of what conduct is acceptable and what behaviour is not acceptable, as well as the consequences of non compliance. Yet, the underlying nature of institutional racism and exclusion means that there is a prevailing reality of power remaining in the hands of leaders, virtually all white males, most of whom are relatively well-off and do not understand racism or its existence and its impact. Black and Asian people are a rarity in any of the board rooms, as are women, whether white or Black. Similar exclusion applies to opportunities for Black and Asian sportspeople to be coaches, managers and administrators. In an international context, the governing authorities of FIFA and UEFA have, at last, given recognition to the fact that racial abuse, harassment and violence are unacceptable behaviours, which still exist in parts of Europe and have to be tackled and eliminated.


Challenging Racism in and through Sport

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xii

Herman Ouseley

Sport offers outlets and opportunities for talented individuals in deprived and disadvantaged communities to escape a life trapped in poverty. It also offers the opportunity for increased participation with obvious health, recreational and leisure benefits. Those people who hold the power and make the key decisions in sport must utilise their influence and scope as a source for good in challenging race hatred, bigotry, ignorance and exclusion, if it is to be eliminated. The work to date by Kick It Out, complemented by other compatible educational and grassroots based, community led projects, such as ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ and ‘Football Unites – Racism Divides’, provides evidence of what can be achieved, if the will is there. Unfortunately, those actively involved in the challenges of combating and eliminating racism are swimming against a tide of anti-immigrant, Islamaphobic, homophobic and anti-semitic hatred, which is made worse by the harsh experiences arising from a global economic recession, widespread unemployment and social class discrimination. The way forward for the sports governing bodies is not to find compliant, compromising and acceptable Black and Minority ethnic individuals who will toe the line and reinforce the status quo. Creating a social construct of what and who are acceptable to the high and mighty men of football, athletics, rugby and the more elite sports of golf and tennis only serves to reinforce institutional racism. The powerful men, who are in denial, must show greater moral leadership in the challenges posed by ‘race’, racism and inequalities, and that inevitably means making uncomfortable decisions and also joining the culture of organisational and status-quo change. Will any of the present leaders in sport governance step forward and, through their actions, inspire this and future generations to accept that racismfree sport is not only desirable and essential, but achievable? It’s all to play for. LORD HERMAN OUSELEY Chair of Kick It Out


Leadership power challenge

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Daryl Adair is Associate Professor of Sport Management at the University of Technology Sydney. He was the organiser of the 2008 conference Sport, Race and Ethnicity: Building a Global Understanding, and is the editor of recent or forthcoming volumes dealing with such themes in: Australian Aboriginal Studies (2009); Sporting Traditions; (2009); International Review for the Sociology of Sport (2010); Sport in Society (2010); Sport Management Review (2010); Cosmopolitan Civil Societies (2010); and the book Sport, ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Aboriginality: Narratives of Difference and Diversity (2010). Mette Andersson is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway. She is also co-director of the International Migration and Ethnic Relations research unit (IMER/Bergen) there. Her research interests are within cultural and political sociology, with specific focus on sports and race, ethnic minority youth and identity work, religious transmission, and political mobilisation among migrants. Steven Bradbury is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Youth Sport at Loughborough University. His research interests include a focus on youth sport volunteering, citizenship and social capital, and the shape and scope of racial exclusions and effectiveness of strategies designed to combat racisms in amateur and professional football in England. Steven is also the founder and former Chair of the Valiants Against Racism campaign at Port Vale Football Club in the Midlands of England. Scott N. Brooks is currently an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is an urban ethnographer primarily concerned with race, class, and gender in social interaction and sport. He has published in academic journals and textbooks and is the author of Black Men Can’t Shoot (University of Chicago, 2009). Ben Carrington teaches sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Carnegie Faculty of Sport and Education at Leeds Metropolitan University, England. He is the co-editor of Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport (Routledge, 2009) and the author of Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (Sage, 2010).


Contributors

George B. Cunningham (PhD, The Ohio State University) is an Associate Professor of Sport Management at Texas A&M University, where he also serves as the Director of the Laboratory for Diversity in Sport. George conducts research in the areas of diversity, group processes, and employee attitudes, and is the author of Diversity in Sport Organizations (Holcomb-Hathaway). xiii

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Carmel Foley is a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney and teaches Sociocultural Concepts for Leisure, Sport and Tourism and Diversity Management. Her research interests and publications are in the areas of leisure history, leisure theory, and sociocultural aspects of leisure. Her most recent project explores aspects of social capital, community and sustainability in the context of events. Carmel also manages a community sport organisation. Kevin Hylton is Reader in the Social Science of Sport, Leisure and PE at Leeds Metropolitan University. Kevin has been heavily involved in research concerning diversity, equity, community and inclusion. He works closely with the Higher Education Association’s Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP) and is associate Director of the Centre for Diversity in the Professions at Leeds Met. Kevin now focuses on the development of Critical Race Theory in the UK and new migration studies and recently published ‘Race’ and Sport: Critical Race Theory. Jonathan Long is a Professor in the Carnegie Research Institute at Leeds Metropolitan University. His primary research interests are with issues of social justice and social change, which have resulted in him directing a suite of projects on the nature and extent of racism in sport. Jonathan is also on the Accreditation Panel for the Racial Equality Standard for professional football clubs. Hazel Maxwell is a PhD candidate and academic in the School of Leisure, Sport and Tourism at the University of Technology, Sydney. Hazel has worked for twenty years in sport, recreation programming and leisure management in both Australia and the UK. Her specific interests include community sport development, sport and social capital, gender issues and cultural diversity. Her doctorate focuses on Muslim women and social capital in community sport organisations. Sam Ramsamy is presently a member of the IOC Executive Board and Vice President of the International Swimming Federation (FINA). He was deeply involved in the struggle for democracy in South Africa and was President of the National Olympic Committee of South Africa 1992–2005. He regularly presents lectures at various international forums on aspects of sport and social change. Karl Spracklen is Principal Lecturer in the Socio-Cultural Aspects of Sport and Leisure at Leeds Metropolitan University. Previously he was National Development Manager at Sporting Equals, a partnership between the Commission for Racial Equality and Sport England promoting racial equality in sport. His recent research investigations have included exploring issues of identity of minority ethnic rugby league players in France and in London.


xiv Contributors

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Megan Stronach is currently working towards a PhD in Sports Management at the University of Technology Sydney having completed a Masters Degree in Sports Management at the University of Canberra. She has many years of experience in sports management and high-performance swim coaching, as well as in the delivery of training in the sport and recreation industry. Her areas of interest are retirement issues surrounding elite and sub-elite athletes, women’s issues in sport, the amalgamation of men’s and women’s sporting organisations and sport governance. Colin Tatz has held chairs of politics at two Australian universities, New England and Macquarie. He is now Visiting Fellow at both the Australian National University (in Social Sciences) and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and is a director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In 21 books, he has analysed comparative race politics, genocide, youth suicide and sports studies. Tracy Taylor is a Professor of sport management and the Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Business at the University of Technology, Sydney. Tracy’s teaching research has a particular focus on human resource management in sport and leadership/executive development. Her recent research projects have been in the areas of cultural diversity management and volunteer management in sport. Paul Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Youth and Community Work at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Paul’s PhD was on community cohesion work with young people, and current research focuses on multiculturalism and identity. A season-ticket holder at Leeds United football club for over twenty years, Paul was a co-founder of the Leeds Fans United Against Racism and Fascism campaign and was later Chair of the International Committee of the national Football Supporters Association. Jacco van Sterkenburg works as a PhD-researcher and teaches at Utrecht University, on the topics of race/ethnicity and (media)sport, from a cultural studies perspective. From 2002–2007, van Sterkenburg was affiliated to the W.J.H. Mulier Institute, Dutch Centre for Research on Sports in Society. He has published in various journals and books and on a variety of topics in the field of the sociology of sport. Stephen Wagg is Professor of Sport and Society at Leeds Metropolitan University. He previously taught at the universities of Leicester and Roehampton. He has written widely on the politics and history of sport as well as on the political aspects of comedy and of childhood. His latest book, written with Belinda Wheaton, Carlton Brick and Jayne Caudwell, is Key Concepts in Sport Studies (Sage, 2009).


Contributors xv

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Part I


Introduction

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1 Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen

Introduction Imagine a social phenomenon that had within it the means to help redress a major social ill, but on closer inspection it was found that it also helped to perpetuate that social ill. The position might be exacerbated by the denial on the part of many involved that there is a social ill to be righted. In the medical world, researchers would try to isolate the beneficial compounds or work out an appropriate dose size that would maximise the chances of recovery and minimise the risk of aggravating the illness. In the social sciences, researchers and other academics might accept a similar challenge. However, their position might be complicated by a lack of agreement on what that challenge really is and suggestions that their own positions do not provide the clearest perspective, and indeed that they may promote crossinfection by their intervention. We are sometimes reproached for criticising sport rather than promoting it. Why do we draw attention to negative aspects of sport rather than celebrate the positive? The fairly obvious response is that if we care for sport, as we do, it would be irresponsible to misrepresent it and allow damaging versions of sport to be dominant. Unless we understand the negative, how can it be remedied? Our responsibility to sport is to do whatever we can to ensure that it complies with the proud claims of its many passionate advocates and becomes a truly positive social force. The potential significance of sport is that although it depends on the construction of an ‘other’ to be defeated, at the same time it represents a shared, mutually understood passion, capable of transcending difference. Racism is a spectre that haunts sport, yet sport can also be a vehicle for challenging racism. Our own programme of research has contributed to a growing body of work documenting the nature and extent of racism in sport and efforts at redress. The very title of this collection of papers indicates an interest in change. While our knowledge grows and various policy initiatives appear to enjoy some success, we can still see the evidence of


Positioning Anti-Racism in Sport and Sport in Anti-Racism

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Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen

damaging consequences of racism in sport. Does this suggest failure or just different ways of seeing? This is not an easy area to research, partly because of sensitivities, partly because of contested definitions. Here we want to set out our own position, which has underpinned a series of research studies. Even if this is not quite consistent with some of our earlier writings, we believe the line of argument is consistent. We do not presume to suggest that all the contributors to the book necessarily subscribe to the same approach, though they have all been selected because of a track record of critical analysis of a complex phenomenon.

‘Race’ and racism I’m five years old and at school I’m asked to look after a new arrival and make him my friend. I take my duties seriously and become his best friend, his only friend for those first few awkward days when he gets familiar with the class and the work and the children. His name is James. He’s taller than me. He’s got black hair. He looks different. Like Spock from Star Trek. But he’s not a Vulcan. He’s Chinese. Like Sulu. Except, as he tells all of us, he’s not Chinese. He’s Scottish. He’s from Glasgow. His parents have bought the take-away shop that’s just around the corner from the school. They’re not from China. They’re from Hong Kong. But he looks Chinese, and he has a Chinese name, too. He’s my best friend, and, for the moment, he’s the centre of attention. It’s not long, though, until I hear the first song. Chinese, Japanese, don’t forget to wash your knees. And the names. And I see how uncomfortable it makes James, even if he doesn’t seem to complain too much about it, even though everyone says they’re going to the chinky for a takeaway. (From a reflection on ethnicity by one of the authors) We all come to ‘race’ and racism as individuals, experiencing difference and prejudice in different ways. Our attempts to understand our own personal experiences of exclusion and hatred, combined with our professional training in exploring the institutionalised structures and cultures of inequality, have led both of us to adopt a personal politics of anti-racism. We work in a research environment in which the legitimacy of ‘race’ as a biologically determined variable is contested (and we subscribe to that position), yet we continually find ourselves examining interpretations of that misleading concept and its ramifications. Particular understandings of ‘race’ and portrayals of ‘the other’ affect the lives of those living in anything other than homogeneous societies, and are typically revealed in some form of racism. So while, like many others, we challenge the legitimacy of ‘race’ as an analytical construct, through its social construction and implementation racism is a very real experience. Moreover, we believe the very public


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opprobrium of overt racism in the discourse and practice of anti-racism paradoxically sometimes makes it difficult to challenge racist cultures and structures that continue below the level of public discourse. A much simplified composite representation of the position of critical social researchers such as Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1993), Cole (1996), Miles (1989), Solomos and Back (1996) and Wieviorka (1995),1 might be summarised as: ●

● ● ●

●

●

●

●

●

‘Race’ is (at best) a questionable biological construct, but a powerful social construction that frames a contentious discourse. Presumed racial distinctions are used as markers to delimit groups. This establishes a system of others who may be patronised or denigrated. Combined with differential levels of power these distinctions serve to limit opportunities and promote behaviour that disadvantages/harms some groups through violence, subordination and exploitation. These distinctions may extend beyond ‘race’ to encompass culture, religion or nationality (cultural racism). From there it is a short step to representing actions not as an attack on the other, but a defence of one’s own (new racism). Racism need not be dependent on the actions of individuals but can be consequent upon the structures and procedures of organisations (institutional racism). The prime target of racism may vary from one context to another and shift through time. We need therefore to consider ‘racisms’ rather than racism.

This multiplicity of racisms is one reason for the apparent paradoxes we continually observe: on the one hand, public commitment to tackling racism in various sports governing bodies; on the other, the continued cultural and structural dominance of those governing bodies by white people.2 The simplistic categories of ‘race’ have also been challenged by studies of diaspora, hybridity and intersectionality. Nonetheless, the continuing salience of ‘race’ suggests that it is one of the forces sustaining a particular world order. Like Lee and Lutz (2005), we recognise the need for critical interpretations of how power operates to transform social relations through racial categories and relationships. One of the critical moments in the UK in recent times was the publication of the report on the police handling of the investigation into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence.3 That report offered the most commonly cited definition in the UK of racism: ‘Racism in general terms consists of conduct or words or practices which disadvantage or advantage people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin (Macpherson, 1999: para 6.4). Significantly, the report went on to observe: ‘In its more subtle form it is as damaging as in its overt form’. In other words, just because your


Positioning Anti-Racism in Sport


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Unwitting racism can arise because of lack of understanding, ignorance or mistaken beliefs. It can arise from well intentioned but patronising words or actions. It can arise from unfamiliarity with the behaviour or cultural traditions of people or families from minority ethnic communities. It can arise from racist stereotyping of black people as potential criminals or troublemakers. Often this arises out of uncritical self-understanding born out of an inflexible police ethos of the ‘traditional’ way of doing things. Furthermore such attitudes can thrive in a tightly knit community, so that there can be a collective failure to detect and to outlaw this breed of racism. People may experience racism without there necessarily being any intent, but we do not find it tenable to argue either that a behaviour is racist simply because someone perceives it to be so, or that people have not been subjected to racism just because they have been unaware of it. These arguments represent the relativism of a constructivist position that we recognise the need to engage with, but we prefer a critical realist position that promotes a notion of social justice. If there is no sense of social justice, then we are left with the equivalence of postmodernism, where the extreme right-wing political parties of Europe claim their defence of white people’s interests is an expression of diversity equivalent to the defence of black people’s interests by various community groups and anti-racism campaigns. Equally we eschew the absolutist position that argues that black people, by definition, cannot be racist. Instead we prefer to focus on racism as an exercise of power, and as power is clearly unequally distributed, the consequences of people’s racism are very different. There are continual reminders of constructivism as we explore the significance of context. For reasons that do not necessarily make sense under the critical gaze of the researcher, sportspeople ‘on the receiving end’ of racist abuse or assault (in our case black footballers – Long et al., 2000) were more forgiving if they attributed it to something forged ‘in the heat of the moment’. This was excused on the basis of being ‘not what they are really like’, and all shake hands afterwards. Conversely it might be argued that it is precisely in such unguarded moments that people reveal what they are really like. The use of racial epithets as banter within a multi-ethnic team is perhaps rather different from abuse between teams. When reported as


racism does not take the form of life-threatening assaults, do not presume that there are no victims. We have to be concerned not just with violent and abusive behaviour or with blunt exclusion, but with the everyday experiences of people through which racism becomes normalised. Similarly, in a passage where it is easy to draw parallels with sport, the Macpherson Report (1999: para 6.17) noted:


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part of the observation within one of our studies, an incident of this kind divided the researchers in their interpretation, some seeing it as evidence of team solidarity and others seeing it as players being complicit in practices they would otherwise condemn. In our own work we have continually been aware of ambiguities and ambivalence, and we note this too in the work of others. If ‘race’ is an intellectual error, how can we encourage people to express their racial identity and afford them equality/rights as ‘races’ (Bonnett, 2000)? We have to beware the danger of dealing with false binaries. For example, how can we accommodate sport research that contests the notion of ‘race’ yet proclaims the importance of black role models? For all our writings about racism, we live in a society in which most people consider racism to be ‘not nice’, something they feel uncomfortable about. The temptation is therefore to locate it ‘somewhere else’, ‘over there’. We have to be critical of manifestations of racism in our sport, in our clubs, in ourselves.

Anti-racism Those who believe racism to be unjustified and damaging to individuals and society are beholden to do something about it. To be effective, that ‘something’ needs to be based on an understanding of the racism(s) to be contested, because anti-racism is essentially reactive. In large part it is defined by the racism it opposes, whether that be a racism founded on hatred of ‘the other’ or one involving a denial of the right to difference (Taguieff, 2001). At the most fundamental level, legislation may be enacted asserting that discrimination on the grounds of ‘race’ or ethnicity (or religion) will not be tolerated. However, our concern here is with more proactive initiatives that have not only been introduced at particular moments in societal responses to racism but may also be part of the sporting landscape. These might entail: ●

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Challenging overt racist behaviour – In society at large this might take the form of hard-line policing (though there is concern about who the police might be hard on) and in sport through club announcements, stewarding, evictions from the ground, bans or prosecution. Education – If racism is founded on ignorance of the other, then education should promote tolerance through increased familiarity. Promoting participation by minority ethnic groups – Simply by increasing the numbers of people from minority ethnic groups they will become less alien, and may indeed be recognised as contributing to the success of sport. Separate development – Some from minority ethnic groups have responded to racist environments by establishing their own set-up, from black




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sections within political parties to sports teams or even leagues defined by ethnicity. Apply pressure to (sports) organisations – Recognising the organisational as opposed to the individual dimension of racism, oblige organisations and their constituent parts to recognise their responsibility to promote racial equality. Affirmative action might be taken to redress unfairness and imbalances by devising mechanisms to promote participation, for example by running coaching or refereeing courses specifically for members of particular minority ethnic communities, or by co-opting people from underrepresented minorities onto committees.

These represent instrumental procedures at the level of the individual or organisation, and may do nothing to address more fundamental structural forces. There are some explanations for racist behaviour (for example, that it is born of poverty and economic fears) that sport is not well equipped to address. While it may be possible for sport to have an impact on the culture of expectation, it is unlikely that it is going to have a major redistributional role in society. Anti-racism has come under attack from different directions, from both left and right, from minority and majority communities. Some are made nervous by anything that draws attention to whatever makes them, in turn, uncomfortable, and argue that the best course is to suffocate it by denying it ‘the oxygen of publicity’. In simple terms the main criticisms might be presented as: 1. ‘Going on about it’ only makes matters worse, tending to exaggerate the problem (D’Souza, 1995). Anti-racism makes real the very thing it wishes to deny, something that is not really there, or at least is not a problem. This comes about because race relations experts have a vested interest in persuading people that racism is a problem. 2. Fixed definitions of cultural difference reverse racist discourse, but simply re-emphasise spurious arguments, lending credence to the categories of the racists (Guillaumin, 1972; Gilroy, 2000a). 3. There is inadequate differentiation of minority ethnic groups. In part because the political movement in the UK inherited its thinking from the civil rights movement in the United States, all minority ethnic groups were identified as ‘black’ just because they shared the repression of racism. Many in the sizeable Asian communities, in particular, bridled at this. 4. The promotion of multiculturalism has led to separate development of ethnic enclaves, to the detriment of community cohesiveness. This is the line currently being argued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK.


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5. Excesses of ‘political correctness’ have become a threat to traditional social values. In suppressing debate for fear of criticism, people are not allowed to discuss very real concerns. As a consequence, resentment builds up among people who should be natural allies. 6. It is all very well being anti-racist, but ‘the movement’ has failed to identify what it is for. This seems a somewhat disingenuous criticism but there is still a need to address the challenge laid down by Solomos and Back (1996), for example, to establish what the normative goal should be. This might entail: living with cultural difference without resorting to essentialist categories; ideas of justice and equality that allow expression of cultural and religious identities; ensuring civil liberty and human rights, including the right to self-determination. That people might disagree about how best to achieve these is hardly surprising, especially given the exhortations to recognise different forms of racism. Clearly, to contest racism it is important to understand racism and to devise differentiated strategies. Twenty years ago Gilroy (1990)4 wrote about the end of anti-racism. Sadly, from our point of view, he did not write that in the belief that it had served its purpose and racism was no more. Instead, he felt that anti-racism movements had lost their way in the 1980s. He wrote of ‘moralistic excesses practised in the name of anti-racism’, its ‘dictatorial character’ and ‘the absurdities of [its] orthodoxy’ (p. 191). Part of Gilroy’s despair was expressed in his railing against a particular form of anti-racism, but some of his critique was more general. We would support his position that ‘ “race” cannot be understood if it is falsely divorced from other political processes or grasped if it is reduced to the effect of those other relations’ (p. 193). Gilroy then extended that argument to criticise ant-racists for becoming divorced from black political movements. That may or may not have been true of the time, but the picture is more complicated than that. The anti-racist project is not just about black liberation, but white liberation too – liberation from the shackles of racism. Although this is not easy to achieve, the challenge is to lay bare the benefits white people enjoy from the normalisation of whiteness, and then persuade them that they are prepared to surrender those.5 Far from managing that, Gilroy felt that the anti-racism movement had been manoeuvred into a position in which its advocates were represented as a challenge to the British way of life and British values, and had been unable to deal with the power of patriotic nationalism. Indeed, he suggests that the left played into the hands of the nationalist right through its preoccupation with ethnic difference in a ‘narcissistic celebration of culture and identity’ (p. 200), and, through promoting cultural relativism, fostered a belief in mutually unintelligible and exclusive ethnic groups. While we acknowledge some of the criticisms of anti-racism, we are not prepared to concede that the need to challenge racism is past.




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Unwilling to allow sport to be naively constructed as an unproblematic force for good, we have conducted a series of studies that have contributed to alerting academics, professionals and policymakers to the nature and extent of racism within sport. Recognising the critiques of ‘anti-racism’, we consider it a necessary stage in both combating racism within sport and in using sport to challenge racism within society. We want to give greater credibility to the concept itself and to the role of sport by subjecting both to analysis. Our concern in this book is with what happens in the various sporting arenas, where the celebration of black sporting prowess has failed to eradicate racism. All the sport-specific anti-racism initiatives in the UK post-dated Gilroy’s gloomy assessment. The oppressive climate generated in football grounds in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s by racist chanting and a strong undercurrent of violence eventually led to the Football Offences Act (1991) which, amongst other things, created an offence of racist ‘chanting’ at football grounds. Although important as a signal, this led to few prosecutions, partly because the Act was originally framed in terms of fans acting in concert, which meant that abuse from individuals did not constitute an offence. That has subsequently been amended so that individuals can be prosecuted. It still rarely results in prosecutions, but there is general agreement that, for a range of reasons, abusive chanting is much reduced. More generally, the development of equality policy in the sports councils of the UK has been in the context of wider societal, legal and governmental drives to establish individual and collective rights and freedoms. Since 2004 the sports councils have framed their equity strategy around ‘The Equality Standard: A Framework for Sport’, the statement of standards that was produced collectively by the sports councils (including UK Sport), and supported by the Central Council of Physical Recreation (CCPR), Women’s Sport Foundation (WSF), English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) and Sporting Equals. Whatever the shortcomings of such standards (see Chapter 5), it has ensured that the sports councils now all have relevant policies and strategies. Part of the context for sports councils’ policies has been provided by rather different initiatives in different sports. ●

Football – Let’s Kick Racism Out Of Football (now known as Kick It Out or KIO) was launched by the Commission for Racial Equality and the Professional Footballers’ Association in 1993. It was only later that the sport’s governing bodies became involved. Show Racism The Red Card was established as an anti-racist educational charity that aims to combat racism by using role models to present anti-racist messages, primarily to young people. There have also been various fan-led initiatives, of which


Sport and anti-racism


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Football Unites, Racism Divides (FURD) in Sheffield has perhaps been the most consistent and dynamic. Both KIO and FURD are a part of the FARE network of anti-racist football organisations in Europe, importantly recognising that while racism may be shaped by local cultural history, it transcends all national boundaries. Cricket – Hit Racism for Six was led by a group of activist fans who were very critical of the cricketing establishment. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) responded with its Clean Bowl Racism and subsequently appropriated the title Hit Racism for Six without acknowledgment. In recent years the ECB has aligned itself with the Sporting Equals initiative for racial equality in sport and worked in conjunction with the International Cricket Council Anti-Racism Policy and the Racism Awareness Campaign of the Professional Cricketers’ Association. Rugby League – Tackle It was a campaign initiated by the governing body, the Rugby Football League (RFL), in response to letters of protest from fans about behaviour on the terraces. For a while the RFL was at the forefront of initiatives to challenge racism in sport, largely because of the interest of a key individual in the governing body. With personnel changes that interest died away, but by that time the British Amateur Rugby League Association (BARLA), then responsible for the amateur game, had picked up the baton. When BARLA and the RFL subsequently merged it took a while for the RFL to re-establish its programme of activity, this time with a broader equality agenda.

Each of these anti-racist initiatives in sport had a very different genesis, variously led by an equality body, a fans’ organisation or the national governing body of the sport. The two key ingredients have been (lack of) continuity of personnel and their persistence, and being able to tap into reliable funding. It is easier for those not responsible for running the sport to bring a critical perspective to bear and shine a light on what needs to be changed; while national governing bodies are in a position to implement change in the way the sport runs. Our earlier work has suggested that it is difficult for many in sport to recognise that there is a problem for them to address (for example, Long, 2000). Others have sought to argue that racism is generated by ‘society’ and it is therefore unrealistic to expect sport to sort out society’s problems. However, there is little doubt that alongside its positive elements, the fevered environment of sport has contributed to the perpetuation and advancement of racism. Moreover, sport has achieved an iconic position in high/late/post/ liquid modernity and cannot deny a responsibility for shaping society.



Historical perspective It is now 45 years since the UK Race Relations Act (1965) in the UK came into force, and 60 since the European Declaration of Human Rights and the


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Universal Declaration of Human Rights were issued by the United Nations. There seems to be a presumption among liberal academics that racial prejudice is declining in this more enlightened age. At one level that appears to be self-evidently true: the ending of apartheid in South Africa and segregation laws in the United States, the recognition of Aboriginal rights in Australia and extensive human rights legislation in Europe. But a closer look reveals a more complex picture. For example, the proportion of people in England and Wales who believe racial prejudice is worsening has reached (in 2007–8) its highest level ‘since records began’ in 1983. Of respondents in the Citizenship Survey (Communities and Local Government, 2008), 56% said racial prejudice had deteriorated in the previous five years (against 43% in 2001 and 48% in 2005). Perhaps counterintuitively, white people were more likely than other ethnic groups to believe prejudice had worsened. Given the preoccupation with ‘the terror threat’, it is not surprising that among minority ethnic groups, people of Pakistani origin are the most likely to think racial prejudice has got worse over the last five years. Giving more cause for optimism, in the same survey young people were found to have more positive views regarding racial prejudice, and so too did white people living in wards where more than 5% of the population are from minority ethnic groups. At the same time ‘only’ 9% say that racial or religious harassment is a problem in their local area, though a further 30% say it is not a very big problem, which might be interpreted as being ‘a bit of a problem’. What do words mean? Against this measure, it is the young people and those from minority ethnic groups (particularly Mixed Race and those of Bangladeshi origin) who are more likely to feel that racial or religious harassment is a problem. At a European level, the Eurobarometer (European Commission, 2008) asked people their impressions of the extent of racial discrimination now, compared with five years ago: the overall EU results are evenly balanced, with 48% (55% in the UK) saying that they think ethnic discrimination is more widespread and 44% that it is less so. This is disappointing, given the various efforts to counteract racism.

Our position Through workshops we have conducted with our team of authors at the Carnegie Research Institute we have become more sensitive to how our own histories shape the way we interpret the data we are presented with. (In case you are wondering, we are both White British.) Even our own narratives are interpreted differently by people we think we are close to intellectually. Interpretation, though, is fraught with difficulty, as evidenced by this extract from one of our research diaries:


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Malcolm often tells us how his status is denied in the eyes of others because he is black. Today I walked into the robing room for graduation


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and Malcolm, immediately behind me, was told he couldn’t come in because it was for staff only. He did get in, and I said to him that he could put that in his notebook as one I had witnessed. At lunch I recounted this little episode to Jim [white], who exclaimed, ‘Exactly the same happened to me’. So what did I witness? I had been quite sure I had seen Malcolm excluded on the grounds of ‘race’ – the presumption that a black man couldn’t be a member of academic staff. But then, just because a white man had been excluded for not looking like a member of staff does not mean that Malcolm had not been challenged because ‘black’ and ‘academic’ did not go together. As we have already suggested, while we certainly understand ‘race’ as a social construction we do not take a purely constructivist position, choosing instead to try to recognise the part played by structural processes. Our own position is one that might more appropriately be described as being informed by Critical Race Theory (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001) rather than being entirely faithful to CRT. Certainly we seek representations through plurivocality and, valuing the experiences and traditions of black and minority ethnic groups, endeavour to recognise the force of white privilege and look to challenge proclaimed ‘race neutrality’ in policy and practice that simply serves to perpetuate the status quo. Through our own writings we have tried to demonstrate the routine, everyday nature of racism. Because it is more appropriate to talk of ‘racisms’ we try to bear in mind that there can be no single or homogeneous approach to tackling racism. Equally, in research terms we assert the importance of combining macroand meso/meta-analysis with micro-analysis to avoid challenges and protests being dismissed as the products of chips on shoulders. It is because of this that we claim the unifying concept through the chapters of this book is a political and intellectual commitment to a critically realist position on racism. We recognise the socially constructed nature of race (and of sport), but remain committed to a philosophy and sociology that deconstructs and challenges racism and the nexus of racism with sport.

The significance of language Whoever originated the expression that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ must have had a very strange view of the world. Abuse is used in sport to hurt, to gain an advantage and to exclude. It delivers an advantage because it does hurt. ‘When the abuse is directed at an individual’s ethnicity it strips the victim of their identity, it attacks their status as a human being and denies their right to dignity’ (Hill, 1989). There is no doubt that a significant part of the anti-racist agenda has been to challenge the use of derogatory language, an endeavour that has drawn




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its own abuse as ‘political correctness gone mad’. We reflect on the use of the word ‘nigger’ in the context of the legacy of white supremacy, but it is also used by young blacks as a term of affection and bonding in an attempt to reclaim language. This context-bound use has confused many whites, and is objected to by many, especially older, blacks. True, there are actions that require little understanding of context to be appreciated, but some knowledge of context is always necessary to evaluate social action. Clearly meanings can change over time. On the way down to the game tonight I overheard two supporters, one saying: ‘Everyone knows you can’t say that these days’. I applaud his sense of outrage and if the message is getting through that it’s wrong to use abusive stereotypes, that can only be welcomed. However, if people still retain the stereotype, albeit unexpressed, there is still a way to go. (Author’s research diary) We know that linguists debate the precise relationship between language, thought and deed, but what we are interested in as critical sociologists is the use of language to create meaning through the agency of individuals. This meaning could be emancipatory, or playful, but in the context of ‘race’ and identity, the meaning-making is constrained by inequalities of power. This Wittgensteinian sense of language allows us to explore the way in which organisations such as government agencies and governing bodies of sport attempt to eradicate racism through language games explicit in policies; yet those same agencies are often directly involved in other language games that exclude the ‘Other’: women, people from BME communities, people with disabilities, all those who have no control over the meaning and purpose of sport. The contributors to this collection recognise that it is not only racist hooligans, players, referees or managers that can wield language to cause damage. The apparently well-meaning can do so too, including those researching in the field. However, rather than trying to maintain a consistent line on appropriate language in this collection we are content that contributors should be guided by the terminology used in their own policymaking and disciplinary communities when dealing with issues of racial equality.

The contribution of research – local responses in the UK Several research papers published in the UK indicate that racism is experienced at both elite and grassroots levels of sport (Long et al., 1997, 2000; Jones, 2002; McGuire et al., 2001; Ismond, 2003; King, 2004a, 2004b; Ratna, 2008). Yet, self-evidently, people from BME communities are still participating in sport. Many of the sportspeople included in these studies adopted the


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attitude that they cannot let racism ‘get to them’ and so chose to ignore it (Long, 2000). Research has revealed a process of denial of the existence or prevalence of racism by many participants, practitioners and policy makers in sport. It has been concluded that attempts are regularly made to ‘explain away’ this insidious phenomenon. Most of the studies have been conducted in football, with some further work in other traditional male sports such as rugby and cricket. ‘Anyone for Cricket?’ investigated the reasons why black and minority ethnic (BME) cricket clubs tend not to affiliate to the Essex Cricket Association (ECA). It found that white clubs were excluding BME clubs through subtle, racialised processes (Centre for Sport Development, 1997). As a result, most respondents from BME communities who were playing in the league denied racism was a serious issue, despite almost all being able to recall experiences or incidents with a racial dimension. Again, although the respondents denied that racism was a serious issue, there was a widespread belief that mainstream leagues were hiding behind league regulations and cultural stereotypes of BME players to prevent BME clubs from being admitted to the league. Where racialised conflict is ignored, authorities are generally in denial that action needs to be taken (Garland and Rowe, 1999). For example, in Leicestershire and Rutland Bradbury (2001a, 2001b) found some football club secretaries were willing to accept racism within the game. He also (Bradbury, 2001a) found that 76% of professional football clubs felt it was unnecessary to do more work specifically with black and Asian fans and clubs. Long and Hylton (2002) demonstrated how these processes should be viewed as the construction of white spaces, thereby explaining how racism(s) and exclusion can go unacknowledged. This is re- emphasised by King (2004b) and Burdsey (2004b), who both outline the adjustments that black players have to make in overtly white spaces. Burdsey’s (2004b) study found it was imperative for Asian players to assimilate to a perceived white identity if they wished to succeed. However, this predicament has still not been recognised by football authorities. Because racism and ethnicity are often not personal issues for those who do not recognise their prevalence, whiteness and the invisibility of racism need to be more fully appreciated in sporting institutions. King argues, in his ethnographic study of football coaching organisations (2004a), that for white players/coaches, ethnicity is not an issue and white ex-players often get a head start over black ex-professionals, not only because of networking and mutual ‘comfort zones’ shared by white men in leading positions, but also, potentially, because of stereotypes about the ability of black coaches. In these circumstances black respondents were highly critical of white people failing to see, and flag up, institutional racism. King argues that recent anti-racism campaigns are fuelled by ‘white man moral guilt’ and do not address the fundamental cause of inequality: invisible and




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unconscious whiteness, something that is harder to challenge than naked racist aggression. Some sportspeople, despite the prevalence of racism, aim to celebrate BME culture and blackness (Carrington, 1998a) and to challenge racism pro-actively on and off the field of play (see also Long et al., 2000; Woodward, 2004; King, 2004b; Bradbury et al., 2006; Burdsey, 2007; Ratna, 2008). Carrington’s illustration of how sport can be used as a tool of resistance to racism is a theme that has re-emerged in subsequent work (such as Burdsey, 2004a, 2004b, 2006; Woodward, 2004; Ratna, 2008;). In light of the racism in grassroots football and the role of football clubs as symbols of ethnic identity, many Asian players play in all-Asian clubs or leagues (Burdsey, 2004a). Burdsey argues that this restricts opportunities for talent identification and recruitment because scouts consider these leagues to be not of the same standard as mainstream leagues. Whereas the normal call from the research is for deliverers to come from BME communities and provide role models, Burdsey’s British Asian respondents were opposed to the idea of using British Asian coaches to facilitate the development of players, as they believed it maintained segregation. Throughout work in this area, there are likely to be contradictions. These need to be carefully considered rather than used to dismiss the need to take action. Woodward (2004) found that many BME interviewees turned to boxing to help fight racism and bullying; sport was used – literally – to fight racism through boxing gyms. Although less well documented, resisting racism through sport also finds expression in women’s football. Ratna’s (2008) research on an Asian women’s football team outlines how members opposed and responded to racism and sexism in their communities, taking to tackling racism by trying to win matches, as in Carrington’s (1998a) study of cricket. The women called for equality in terms of ethnicity as well as gender, and were passionate about confronting sexism within their religious communities. This is a rare study, as Asian women using football as a vehicle to challenge the system and fight racism in sport had not previously registered in research in sport and physical recreation in the United Kingdom.

The book Even in our efforts to adopt multicultural perspectives, we recognise that our own work is very much tied to the UK environment. To offer fresh insights we have recruited contributors from other countries. We certainly believe that the papers here avoid Gilroy’s (1990: 208) criticism that ‘antiracism activities trivialise the rich complexity of black life by reducing it to nothing more than a response to racism’.


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Avoiding the temptation to provide a string of case studies, with our contributors we aim to assess sport’s contribution to anti-racism in the context of sporting cultures and policy processes. Assessment of progress has to be addressed through a consideration of different agents of change: sportsmen and women, fans, sporting organisations, non-sports institutions and socio-political shifts. In this exercise, contributors draw on empirical case study research, but marry this with more theoretically framed understandings of policies about/ towards racism. These papers are more than a set of case studies of different experiences; they constitute a blend that is theoretical, empirical, international and multi-disciplinary. They illustrate that while ‘race’ may be a non-construct in biological terms, in the way in which people (mistakenly) understand it in multicultural societies, ‘race’ as a construct has profound implications for lived experiences, regardless of ethnicity or nation. Failure to acknowledge that or to address racism directly is to condemn society to repeat transgressions. The book offers contemporary perspectives supplemented with analysis of the past. Its goal is to map the dimensions of the challenge to racism in and through sport. The structure of the book acts as a framework for exploring sport and challenges to racism. Immediately after this introductory chapter is a chapter by Jacco van Sterkenburg, which helps articulate some of the theoretical substance, using the Netherlands as a focus. The remaining chapters are divided into three sections. The first section, Practices, examines some historical trends in anti-racism policies and practices in sport, and how these have coalesced in this century. The chapters in this section draw on a range of research from around the world, from South Africa to Australia. The next section, Identities, looks at the role sport plays in constructing national and racial identities, and how anti-racism plays a part in challenging and deconstructing such identity formation. The research is again international in its reach, with chapters on Norway and the United States. The third and final section, Challenges, explores the way in which debates and campaigns about anti-racism in sport have led to changes in the policies and practices of sport. Again, there is an international reach in this section, though there is also a focus in the first two chapters on English football. These sections, of course, are there primarily to lend coherence to the book: we believe that all the chapters explore and critique practices and identity formation, and all discuss challenges that need to be addressed.

Notes



1. This list might be considerably extended, though we certainly do not want to imply that they would all subscribe to all of this; indeed, this collection of authors is happy to have lively arguments amongst themselves. 2. White men might be more appropriate than white people, of course.


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3. Although the attack itself was not perpetrated by the police, this acquired a similar status to the Rodney King affair in the United States. 4. Substantively re-published two years later in J. Donald and A. Rattansi (eds) (1992) pp. 49–61. 5. We write in a society dominated by whiteness; most other societies will have their cultural equivalent.


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2 Jacco van Sterkenburg

Introduction This chapter will be about how race and ethnicity are considered social constructs in scholarly discourses about sport, but are often treated as essentialist categories in popular and governmental discourses about sport, with consequences for racial and ethnic inequalities in society at large. A cultural studies perspective, along with social cognition theory, provides the theoretical framework within which to highlight the centrality of classification and categorisation in the popular use of the concepts of race and ethnicity and emphasise the constructive character of race and ethnicity in scholarly discourse. I will review dominant racial and ethnic categories which work in sport research as well as popular and governmental discourses about sport to construct and normalise racial/ethnic hierarchies. New ways of using race and ethnicity in sports policy and research that are more open to the temporal and situational character of race and ethnicity will be suggested. As authors like Brubaker et al., (2004) argue, the social constructions of race and ethnicity are significant structuring dimensions in contemporary western societies and serve as important ways of categorising the self and others. Ideas about racial and ethnic groups and the multicultural society are influenced not just by institutions such as education, family and paid labour, but also by sport. Due to its popularity and the visibility it gives to various ethnicities, (televised) sport – and soccer in particular as one of the most popular sports worldwide – has become an important factor in the expression of racial and ethnic meanings and categorisations. This is evident in a recent article in the national Dutch quality newspaper De Volkskrant that states that ‘the line-up of the Dutch [soccer] team under 17 at Euro 2008 reads like an exotic menu’. According to the writers of the piece, Dibi and Jungmann (2008), the Dutch national soccer team will become increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-racial. Another article in the same newspaper adds that ‘a new phenomenon already presents itself; the


Thinking ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in (Dutch) Sports Policy and Research

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Jacco van Sterkenburg

former asylum seeker as professional soccer player ... [such as] Youssouf Hersi from Ethiopia, Collins John from Liberia and Haris Medunjanin from Bosnia’ (Vissers, 2005: 40). These quotations illustrate the multiplicity and range of ethnic groups that are represented in Dutch professional soccer. And this multi-ethnicity is not restricted to soccer or the Dutch context: it is illustrative of professional as well as amateur sports worldwide (Coakley, 2007; Poli and Ravenel, 2008). Two schools of thought can be roughly distinguished in the (Dutch) debate about the social functions of sport for the multicultural society: one more popular and commonsense, the other more scholarly and critical (Hartmann, 2000). The popular and commonsense discourse about sport generally emphasises and takes for granted the beneficial effect of sport on racial and ethnic relations. Politicians and the mainstream media in the Netherlands generally seem to support this positive perspective towards the social function of sport (van Sterkenburg, 2010). They argue that sport, with its appeal to a variety of ethnic and cultural groups, makes a fundamental contribution to interethnic interaction and dialogue, and to processes of social bonding and integration in multicultural societies (for example, Verweel, 2007). This sport-as-a-progressive-racial/ethnic-force discourse (Hartmann, 2000) is evident in Dutch national governmental programmes that often use sport as a social panacea, to solve problems of, for instance, obesity among young people or to face the challenges arising from the integration of ethnic minorities (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2005). And this emphasis on sport as a social leveller is not restricted to the domains of politics or everyday discourse, but is also evident in some Dutch academic writing on race/ethnicity and sport (Verweel, 2007). In contrast to this perspective stands the recognition, by many Dutch as well as international critical scholars of sport, that sport also harbours racialised (as well as homophobic, sexist or sectarian) ideologies. They emphasise that racism, homophobia and sectarianism are persistent aspects of sport and that (mediated) sport confirms and reinforces, and at times challenges, racial and ethnic stereotypes as well as more institutionalised forms of racism (for example, Boyle and Haynes, 2000; van Sterkenburg and Knoppers, 2004; Müller et al., 2008). These scholars see the sports arena primarily as ‘a site of struggle’ in which different dimensions of ethnic bonding and ethnic exclusion are performed, experienced and demonstrated (Elling and van Sterkenburg, 2008). The purpose of this chapter is not so much to elaborate in detail on perspectives on both sport and race/ethnicity. Previous studies have already extensively discussed the role of sport as a potential catalyst for racial and ethnic relations, and generally concluded that sport should be considered a ‘contested racial terrain’ (Hartmann, 2000: 245) and that ‘it is too simplistic to say that sport improves “race relations”, just as it is to say that sport can only reproduce racist ideologies’ (Carrington and McDonald,


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2001a: 2). However, the specific racial/ethnic categorisations that these two views towards sport generate and (re)produce have received relatively little scholarly attention until now. As several authors have discussed, racial and ethnic categorisations are essential in structuring the very ways in which people think about and give meaning to race and ethnicity (Hall, 1995). Racial and ethnic categorisations permit individuals to go beyond immediately given information, to make inferences and interpret the world according to these established categories (Brubaker et al., 2004). They give people a definition of what race or ethnicity is (Hall, 1995). This chapter critically interrogates the common sense and often taken for granted use of racial/ethnic categorisations in Dutch sports policy and everyday discourse about race and ethnicity. I will juxtapose these categorisation practices with the racial/ethnic categorisations used in critical scholarly studies (Dutch as well as international) on race and ethnicity in sport and the sport media. These studies are usually informed by a constructionist approach to race and ethnicity. I will argue that both categorisation practices pose their own problems. Suggestions will be made about how to synthesise the two perspectives. Such an effort seems relevant for sensitising researchers as well as (Dutch) policy makers in the field of race and ethnicity and sports, helping them to conceptualise race and ethnicity in more self-reflexive and contextual ways.

My theoretical lens A cultural studies approach provides the theoretical lens through which I approach sports, the sports media and race and ethnicity. This perspective sees sport and the media as aspects of popular culture through which people formulate and put into action ideas about race and ethnicity. In other words, sport, sport governing bodies as well as the sport media can be considered as sites that provide people with discourses about race and ethnicity. Stuart Hall, a leading proponent of cultural studies, defines discourse as ‘ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic’ (1997a: 6). While discourse ‘rules in’ and prefers certain ways of talking about a topic, it also by definition rules out, limits and restricts other ways of talking about that topic. In that sense discourse constructs the topic, defines and produces it (Hall, 1997a). Both race and ethnicity can be considered as social phenomena that are constructed and reconstructed in and through discourses. Central to the understanding of race and ethnicity from a cultural studies perspective is their reflection of existing power relations. Discourses about race and ethnicity in sport and sport media, as in other domains, reflect inequalities of power in which powerful groups in society have more power to label, categorise and define the less powerful (Feagin and Vera, 1995). Although some critical examinations of race and ethnicity have revealed their distinctive conceptual character by associating race with social


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meanings given to biology and inherited differences, and ethnicity with cultural differences (Jackson and Garner, 1998), others argue that these constructs also overlap and are often conflated in western societies (Rath, 1991; Eriksen, 2002; Brubaker et al., 2004). The conflated character is evident when ethnic groups are described in racial terms, for instance when all ‘black’ people from the African diasporas, variegated in ethnic terms, are aggregated and lumped together into the racial category of ‘blacks’ (Omi and Winant, 1986), or when all (West) Europeans are labelled ‘white’ despite ethnic differences among them. In this chapter, I will also refer to the constructs of race and ethnicity as conflated constructs.

The Dutch context Apart from being theoretically informed by a cultural studies perspective, my view on race and ethnicity in sport is also influenced by being a (white, male) Dutch sport scholar. The Dutch situation with regard to (discourses about) race and ethnicity is unique in several aspects and therefore deserves some explanation. Philomena Essed (2004), a scholar in the area of Dutch ethnic and racial relations, has noted the specificity of the Dutch context, stating that discourse about race and ethnicity in the Netherlands is framed in terms of ethnic or cultural minorities and their lack of integration (see also Rath, 1991). As in other European countries like France or Finland (Silverman and Yuval-Davis, 1999; Rastas 2005), the race category ‘black’ and the use of the ‘black–white’ dichotomy to define race, commonly used in US and UK discourses about race, is generally rejected in popular Dutch discourse. According to the Dutch Central Office for Statistics, the four largest ethnic minorities in the Netherlands are defined as ‘Turkish’, ‘Moroccan’, ‘Surinam’ and ‘Dutch-Antillean and Aruban’ (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2009). These ethnic groups comprise around 7% of the total Dutch population (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2009). The Surinamese and Antillean ethnic minorities are linked to the Dutch colonial past, while the Turkish and Moroccan immigrants are linked to economic labour migration during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to this discourse about minority ethnic groups, Dutch everyday and governmental discourse about race/ethnicity focuses on the binary categorisation of allochtonen and autochtonen. The term autochtoon could be loosely translated as ‘indigenous’ and allochtoon as ‘foreigner’. But since these terms are contextualised in the Dutch discourse about race and ethnicity, a precise translation into English is not possible (van Sterkenburg et al., forthcoming). Official Dutch governmental policies classify an individual as allochtoon if one parent was born out of the Netherlands and as autochthon if both parents were born in the Netherlands. In everyday discourse, however, these ethnic categories are also highly racialised because skin color has become an important marker of both categories. All


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non-western ethnic minorities of colour are usually classified as allochtoon while ‘white’ Native-Dutch people are called autochtoon. I shall reflect on this categorisation further on in the chapter. In the following, I will discuss the sport-as-a-progressive-racial/ethnicforce discourse and the more critical, scholarly discourse with regard to how they both perceive the social function of (Dutch) sports for racial and ethnic relations. In particular, I will focus on the racial/ethnic categorisations these two discourses (re)produce (or challenge). After discussing these categorisation practices, I will try to bring the two perspectives together. Some guidelines will be suggested for the use of race and ethnicity in future sports policy and research that is more sensitive and open to their contextual character and to the power relations involved in the constructions and definitions of race and ethnicity.

Dutch sports policy discourse and racial/ethnic categorisations The dominant political discourse about race/ethnicity and sport in the Netherlands has been largely concerned with how sports can be beneficial for interethnic relations through interethnic contact and how it can contribute to the integration of ethnic minorities. This discourse was demonstrated, for instance, when the former Dutch Minister of Integration, Rita Verdonk, argued that participating in sport brings people closer to one another and that ethnic mingling in sport contributes to integration (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2006a). Included in this political discourse about sport is the use of specific racial and ethnic categorisations that define the target groups of sport policies or locate problematic groups that these policies address. These racial/ethnic categorisations represent, often implicitly, certain discourses about race and ethnicity and specific hierarchies that reach many people simultaneously, often through the media. The question of relevance then becomes which racial and ethnic categories and discourses about race and ethnicity are dominant and preferred in this sport-as-a-positive-racial/ethnic-force ideology, and which are marginalised, and how this connects with the relations of power in society at large. As discussed earlier, discourses about race/ethnicity in the Netherlands mainly centre around two categorisations; one that distinguishes between the largest ethnic minorities in the Netherlands and one that distinguishes between the categories of autochtonen (indigenous) and allochtonen (foreigner). In the next sections, I will discuss how the widespread and often unreflexive use of the allochtoon/autochtoon categorisation in particular, in a recent influential Dutch sport policy document/programme, can result in one-sided governmental sports policies that are very much situated in an assimilationist framework towards racial/ethnic relations and the multiethnic society.




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The Dutch governmental sport programme Meedoen allochtone jeugd door sport (‘Participation of allochthonous youth through sport’), in which 500 Dutch sport clubs participate, was initiated by the Dutch government in 2006. The programme is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport for the period 2006–2010 and aims to increase the numbers of ethnic minority youth (4–23 years) who are members of a sport club (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2005, 2006b, 2006c). The programme explicitly uses sport as a tool for achieving social goals, in particular to improve the integration of racial/ethnic minorities in Dutch society. The following quote, referring to the programme, is a concrete manifestation of this: In the programme (Meedoen allochtone jeugd door sport) the characteristic aspects of sports will be used for pedagogical and integration purposes towards allochthonous youth. This will take place through the creation of fields of encounter between autochthonous and allochthonous youth in sport [...]. (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2006b: 3) As this quote demonstrates, the Dutch programme reproduces the dominant allochtoon/autochtoon binary. Although it briefly addresses the participation of autochthonous youth in sport and the role of white autochtohonous sports clubs in the integration of minority ethnic youth (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2006c), the programme is particularly directed towards allochthonous youth (2006b; 2006c). This dominant focus on allochthonous youth is evident when the document continues by saying that the programme aims to ‘convey norms and values’ to allochthonous youth and ‘teach [them] how to deal with rules’ (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport 2006b: 4). These quotes are situated in a sport-as-a-positive-racial/ ethnic-force-discourse that is characterised by the idea that the assimilation of allochthonous youth into the mainstream of Dutch values is a positive contribution that can be made by sport. The focus on the category of allochthonous youth in the policy programme and the perceived need to teach them Dutch norms and values through sport reflects the wider Dutch discourse about race and ethnicity that emphasises the need for the social group of allochtonen to assimilate to dominant Dutch norms and values. In other words, sport is used here to bring the cultural norms and values of allochtonen closer to those of autochtonen while rendering the social group of (‘white’) autochtonen normative. An instrumentalist discourse of this type thus reduces the Dutch population to discrete racial/ethnic groups – allochtonen and autochtonen – that implicitly continue to be hierarchically positioned according to ‘the ascribed proximity to the normative structure of white [autochthonous] collective identity’ (Carrington and McDonald,


The governmental programme Meedoen allochtone jeugd door sport


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2001b: 59). In doing so, the discourse implicitly denies the allochtone/nonwhite individual the right to be different and assesses him/her exclusively with regard to his/her degree of assimilation to the dominant (Dutch) cultural norms and values. In other words, the allochtoon/autochtoon categorisation used in sport policy documents such as Meedoen allochtone jeugd door sport is situated in a discourse that privileges one racial/ethnic group (autochtonen) above the other (allochtonen). This mainstream Dutch sports policy discourse surrounding race and ethnicity is consistent with Hall’s (1991) statement that the ethnic majority finds itself in an ideal subject position with respect to ethnicity in many social practices, including sport. Although ethnic majority and minority Dutch citizens increasingly interact in their neighbourhood, at work or in leisure time, ethnic majority people in general have more discursive power to stipulate the dominant discourses and categorisations about ethnicity (Elling and van Sterkenburg, 2008). This also applies to the area of Dutch sports policy: the vast majority of sports policy makers belong to the ethnic majority group that can be defined as white and autochtoon in everyday discourse. Their discursive power (re)produces the allochtoon–autochtoon dichotomy in Dutch sports policies and society at large. This dichotomy causes those labelled as autochtonen (and ‘white’) generally to be ‘inside, included and powerful’, as the ‘we’, the ‘answer’ and, most notably, to be unspoken (Dyer, 1997; Wekker, 1998). The categories of allochtonen or ethnic minorities (generally non-white), on the other hand, are often stereotyped as the ‘other’ and are often (unconsciously) represented as less intelligent, deviant, uncivilised and the source of the problem (Van Dijk, 1993; Wekker, 1998). This discourse thus constructs a racial/ethnic hierarchy that represents the socially constructed group of allochtonen as culturally less developed vis-à-vis the socially constructed group of autochtonen. This may not be a conscious process; ‘white’/autochthonous people may reproduce and strengthen the status quo without knowing it (Hall, 1995).

Cultural racism The dominance of a (white) autochtoon (sports policy) discourse that strengthens and revolves around this hierarchical relationship between autochtonen and allochtonen determines the kind of integration that it will finally produce. Such a discourse reveals what several authors have labelled the operation of ‘cultural racism’ (Carrington and McDonald, 2001a). Cultural racism constructs insider and outsider groups on the basis of cultural assimilation to Dutch mainstream norms and cultural values. It is signified by and conflated with biological and religious markers of difference, evident from the fact that it is, in particular, non-western ethnic minorities of colour or ‘Muslims’ who are labeled allochtoon in contemporary everyday Dutch discourse. This dominant way of ‘thinking’ race and ethnicity in




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terms of homogeneous and fixed entities marginalises alternative engagements with race and ethnicity in sports policy or society at large. It does not address cultural differences within or similarities between the broadly defined categories of allochtonen and autochtonen (Wekker, 1998; Gunaratnam, 2003). It also runs the risk of ignoring the fact that race and ethnicity are always co-constituted by other axes of power such as gender, age or social class (Wekker, 1998). In addition, it does not generate a critical reflection on the imagined homogeneous group of (‘white’) ‘autochthonous people’ and its privileged position in the Dutch mainstream discourse about race/ ethnicity. To summarise, the (re)production of the autochtoon–allochtoon categorisation scheme in the Dutch sport-as-a-positive-racial/ethnic-force ideology is not ideologically neutral, but socially produced, and situated in a certain hegemonic (white) autochthonous ideology that privileges white autochtonen above non-white allochtonen. The autochthonous (white) perspective that historically produced this dichotomy in the first place remains invisible and, as a result, it becomes difficult to reveal the normativeness of ‘autochthonness’/’whiteness’ in Dutch policies and society. What is at stake here, from a cultural studies perspective, is the disappearance of the constructedness of the ethnic categorisations of allochtonen and autochtonen into the taken-for-granted world of common sense (Hall, 1995; 1997a). If existing discourses about ethnicity and ethnic categorisations – or other social group relations – are increasingly being ‘naturalised’ through their repeated and seemingly self-evident use in (sport) policies, they are likewise increasingly placed beyond the reach of change and political intervention. Such an unreflexive (sports) policy can then only direct itself towards what it does know, what is visible and what ‘should be civilised’: the ‘allochtone’ Other.

The scholarly, constructionist discourse Constructionist scholarly writings on race and ethnicity have extensively criticised such ‘normalised’ hierarchical accounts of racial/ethnic categories as pure and fixed entities (for example, Hall, 1997a) and have emphasised that race and ethnicity are social constructs that are context-specific and dependent on power relations. It is not surprising that Dutch scholars using a constructionist approach are critical of the Dutch governmental use of race/ethnicity as a ‘given’ and seemingly fixed characteristic that can be pinned down along the lines of the (hierarchical) dichotomy between allochtonen and autochtonen (Wekker, 1998). Dutch as well as international critical scholars emphasise the temporal and situational character of race and ethnicity, by pointing, amongst other factors, to the historically shifting boundaries that determine who is included in a certain racial category and who is not. The scholars of race Omi and Winant (1986) and Nederveen


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Pieterse (1995), for instance, demonstrated that populations nowadays defined as ‘white’ in the US and UK, such as South-European and Irish immigrants, have been defined as distinct ‘races’ in the past.1 Captain and Ghorashi (2001) illustrated the historical flexibility of who is labelled as allochtoon and autochtoon in the Dutch context by describing the shifting position of Dutch immigrants originating from the former colony of the Dutch East Indies (Indische Nederlanders). These immigrants of Dutch and Indonesian origins came to the Netherlands in the 1950s. In order to limit their immigration into the Netherlands, the government divided this variegated group into two subgroups; those who were perceived as oriented towards the Netherlands (‘Western-oriented Indische Nederlanders’) and those with Indonesian roots (‘Eastern-oriented Indische Nederlanders’) (Schuster, 1999: 311). The first group mainly included white Dutch individuals who had lived in the Dutch East Indies only temporarily, while the second group consisted of people of mixed Indonesian and Dutch origin most of whom had never seen the Netherlands (Schuster, 1999). The group constructed as Easternoriented Indische Nederlanders were then discouraged from immigrating to the Netherlands because of their perceived genetic inability to assimilate (Captain and Ghorashi, 2001). One decade later, however, the same government radically changed its view and considered the whole group of Indische Nederlanders as successfully assimilated in Dutch society. While they were thus (in part) defined as ‘the Other’ upon their arrival in the Netherlands, they became socially invisible one decade later and are now even praised for their successful assimilation into Dutch society (Captain and Ghorashi, 2001).2 When the label allochtoon became dominant in Dutch policy discourse in the 1990s (Captain and Ghorashi, 2001), this minority ethnic group managed to escape the label (non-western) allochtoon altoghether. The emphasis in contemporary sociological work on the temporality and situatedness of (meanings given to) race and ethnicity has also resulted in a growing body of literature that examines and reflects on the construction of whiteness as a privileged and normative category (Dyer, 1997; Garner, 2006). Sport has proved to be a useful sociological site for examining whiteness, white privilege and racial/ethnic hierarchies (for example, Long and Hylton, 2002). In the Dutch context, authors like Elling (2007) have reflected on the difficulties that ‘white’, autochthonous athletes have in seeing their own (‘white’) ‘autochtonness’. The shift in attention towards the dominant ethnic/racial ‘Self’ instead of the marginalised ethnic/racial ‘Other’ can be considered an important contribution to the sometimes pathologising, almost exclusive, attention paid to the [black or allochtone] Other in sport sociological research and governmental programmes like Meedoen allochtone jeugd door sport. But despite the significant contributions that constructionist scholarly writings have made to examining white privilege and to the deconstruction




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Social constructionism and racial/ethnic categorisations The major problem that social constructionist writers face when it comes to the use and definitions of race and ethnicity is how to reckon with everyday essentialism and popular racial/ethnic categorisations (Brubaker et al., 2004; Nayak, 2006). Social constructionist writers generally reject the use of stabilised and essentialist categories, but they also tend to reify them in their studies. Nayak (2006) illustrated this ambiguity by stating that social constructionist writers emphasise, on the one hand, that there are no ‘distinct races with biologically inherent characteristics or culturally immutable ethnicities’ (Nayak, 2006: 411), but at the same time ‘freeze, tame and objectify race and ethnicity into unitary categories that can be easily understood and managed’ (Gunaratnam, 2003: 33). Brubaker et al., (2004: 45) agreed and argued that despite the constructivist stance that has come to prevail in sophisticated studies of ethnicity ... much ostensibly constructivist academic writing about ethnicity remains informed by ‘groupism’: by the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous, and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts and fundamental units of social analysis. Ethnic groups, races and nations continue to be treated as things-in-the-world, as real, substantial entities. The tendency to use stabilised, essentialist categories to define race or ethnicity seems particularly evident in some of the more quantitatively oriented studies that subscribe to a social constructionist approach. In a meta-analysis on quantitatively oriented media studies that examined racial and ethnic representations in the sport media, we found that many North American and British researchers subscribed to a social constructionist approach on the one hand but used a definition of race or ethnicity in terms of black and white a priori on the other (van Sterkenburg et al., forthcoming). These studies generally froze and classified race and ethnicity into the seemingly fixed and stable categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’ (van Sterkenburg et al., forthcoming). Even in West European contexts like the Dutch, social constructionist researchers have used a similar predefined black-white conceptualisation of race (for example, Knoppers and Elling,


of common sense discourses about race and ethnicity, their use of racial/ ethnic categorisations also poses some theoretical and methodological problems. In the remainder of this section I will make this problem more explicit by discussing the kinds of racial/ethnic categorisations that some constructionist scholarly writings on sport have produced in and through their studies.


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1999). This is remarkable, since Dutch popular discourse, as explained earlier in this chapter, focuses more on the broad allochtoon/autochtoon dichotomy or a diversity of ethnic or cultural minorities. The use of a black– white dichotomy to define race or ethnicity in Dutch scholarly studies may obscure relevant ethnic distinctions that go beyond what can be captured by the black–white mapping. The end result of such scholarly routines is that they might reproduce universalist forms of essentialism, stereotyping and racialised power relations, instead of unravelling and deconstructing mechanisms of racial or ethnic inequality in sport or the sport media in the specific context under study. Researchers who subscribe to a social constructionist approach towards race and ethnicity thus need to move away from predefining racial/ethnic categorisations as if they were universally applicable and ahistorical. Such predefining categorisation practices still guide the questions some social constructionist scholars pose and the knowledge they produce. In particular, studies that work with large volumes of data and that are characterised by the process of classifying and categorising these data along racial/ethnic lines, should remain open to the temporality and situatedness of racial and ethnic categorisations and use categories that are relevant in the context under study (van Sterkenburg et al., forthcoming). In the next section, I will attempt to provide some theoretical and methodological guidelines for ‘thinking’ race/ethnicity and using racial/ethnic categories in scholarly research that does justice to the tension that exists between aiming to approach race and ethnicity as socially constituted and contextual constructs on the one hand, while also acknowledging the need to examine large volumes of data and the logic behind the use of everyday essentialist categories on the other. Apart from suggesting guidelines for future (sports) research, I also aim to demonstrate how these insights can result in a more sophisticated usage of the concepts of race and ethnicity in (Dutch) sports policy and help policy makers escape blinkered thinking.

Bringing the perspectives together As I argued in the previous section, an essentialist (common sense) approach towards race/ethnicity that defines the concept in seemingly stable and ‘naturalised’ hierarchical categories like ‘black’ and ‘white’ or ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ has generally been rejected within the scholarly (social constructionist) paradigm. It gives the impression of biological or cultural determination, while racial or ethnic groups do not in fact have any biological or cultural essence but are socially constructed and change over time and place (Miles, 1989). However, social constructionist writers do regularly use a notion of race/ethnicity that ‘freezes’ the concept into seemingly stable and ‘naturalised’ categories (Nayak, 2006), in particular when they have to manage and classify large volumes of data. In contrast




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to scholarly discourses, an essentialist approach towards race and ethnicity is much more commonplace and accepted in everyday and governmental discourses about race and ethnicity. Brubaker et al., (2004) and Baumann (1999) argued that an approach towards race/ethnicity that emphasises its essentialist and categorical character is very popular in everyday conversations, political rhetoric and the (sport) media, for the racial/ethnic majority as well as minorities. Because so many laypeople embrace a view of race/ ethnicity that more or less essentialises others and the self into seemingly fixed racial/ethnic categories, Baumann (1999) argued that it cannot be simply discarded; after all, ‘it shapes the realities that we [as sociologists] need to understand’ (Baumann (1999: 90–91). For this reason, I would argue that scholars should not treat both approaches – the essentialist, categorical approach and the scholarly, constructionist approach – as opposites and mutually exclusive, with the one as false and the other as true. Instead, I would suggest considering them as complementary rather than oppositional (Baumann, 1999). We can do this by acknowledging that both approaches are largely directed towards different questions. The categorical approach works with discrete categories that are actually used to define race/ethnicity in daily practice. The constructionist approach, which is supported by most scholars within the social and human sciences, emphasises how these categories are at the same time contextual, fluid and constructed. Connecting the two perspectives requires attending to everyday essentialist, popular, categorical definitions of race and ethnicity as well as to structures of power and structural inequalities that are related to how these racial and ethnic categories have come into being, are continuously (re)constructed, played out and change over time and place (Malik, 1996). It also requires attending to how these popular and essentialist categorisations are themselves the structuring principles of social life in contemporary multi-ethnic societies and, consequently, the vectors of existing relations of power. As argued earlier in the paper, the naturalisation of racial/ethnic categories (implicitly) relates to very specific racial/ethnic hierarchies. To make my argument more precise I will refer here to the writings of the theorists Baumann (1999) and Brubaker et al., (2004), who mainly approach race and ethnicity as social cognitive categories. Social cognition theory attributes popular societal categorisations of race and ethnicity to mental classification practices that are used by many to understand the world (van Sterkenburg et al., forthcoming). Although these authors argue that we should avoid ‘analytical groupism’, that is, the tendency to treat racial and ethnic groups as predefined entities, they argue that we should take into account the importance of ‘groupism’ and categories in the practice of everyday thought, talk, policy analysis, media broadcasting and even some of the constructivist academic writing about race and ethnicity (Baumann, 1999; Brubaker et al., 2004). They highlight the centrality of categorisation


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in the popular use of the concepts of race and ethnicity, while emphasising at the same time its constructive character. Without ignoring the shared content of a racial or ethnic group, their perspective claims that this shared content has no a priori existence or stability (also Eriksen, 2002). It is the product of people’s ways of categorising themselves and others, in order to create boundaries between them and construct racial/ethnic hierarchies. In other words, it is people’s beliefs about racial or ethnic differences that create the categories. It is not important whether race and ethnicity ‘in reality’ are relevant categorising variables here: if they are believed to be relevant, this belief is real in its consequences (Woodward, 2004). Race and ethnicity should, therefore, be understood in terms of categories, but these categories should not be considered and used as pre-defined and already fixed entities that can be a priori operationalised, as many Dutch politicians, as well as some social constructionist researchers studying race and ethnicity, still do. In other words, although the binary racial and ethnic classification allochtonen–autochtonen is commonplace and dominant in Dutch society, is rooted in cognitive processes, and even institutions like the state routinely categorising people as members of the allochtone or autochtone group, the very process of this categorising is a practice from a specific (‘white, autochthonous’) racial/ethnic standpoint; an inventive/constructive act which is shaped by human minds (Baumann, 1999). Precisely because racial and ethnic categories are socially constructed and can change across cultural and historical boundaries, I argue that researchers as well as politicians should be more self-reflexive of their use of racial and ethnic categorisations. This implies, amongst others, an emphasis on and reflection of power relations and racial/ethnic perspectives from which these categorisations emerge. Categorising practices always relate to wider power structures and racialised/ethnicised histories in society at large (Leonard, 2004). In addition, they are always expressed through voices that are racially/ ethnically positioned (Wekker, 1998). Therefore, the point is not so much to ‘deny the importance – both material and discursive – of [racial/ethnic] categories, but to focus on the process by which they are produced, experienced, reproduced and resisted in everyday life’ (McCall, 2005: 1783). In Dutch sport policy, this means that policy makers should avoid attempting to almost exclusively represent the allochtone Other in their governmental programmes. Instead they should also reflect on their own ethnic positioning and acknowledge the autochtone Self as the subject for policy analysis and governmental address. This means, for instance, that policy makers should critically expand on the role that autochtone (white) sport clubs play in the participation and integration of ethnic minority youth. Although this notion is briefly touched upon in Dutch sport policy programmes like Meedoen allochtone jeugd door sport, such programmes generally address the social group of allochtonen. Addressing the autochtone Self in governmental programmes also means a shift in focus onto more




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institutionalised forms of racism in sport organisations.3 Ethnic minorities are still significantly underrepresented in boardrooms and other managerial positions within many sport clubs and organisations as well as sport governing bodies. This situation is not unique to the Netherlands, but applies to other European countries as well (van Sterkenburg and Rijnen, 2005). As a consequence, the (unwritten, informal) rules and norms in most sport organisations always fit most closely the preferences, norms and interpretation frames of the (white) racial/ethnic majority (Elling and van Sterkenburg, 2008). The rules of the ethnic majority have thus become, and continue to be, the ‘norm’ for the organisation of sport. Governmental programmes can address this phenomenon more explicitly and stimulate a critical (self) reflection on the unequal racialised/ethnicised distribution of power in sport clubs and sporting bodies. As Gloria Wekker (1998), a scholar in the area of Dutch racial and ethnic relations, has argued, the presence and mere existence of the allochtone Other is always relational and refers to the presence of the (normative and normalised) autochtone Self. A more balanced policy discourse along these lines would overcome the invisibility of the (white) autochtone Self that implicitly functions as the norm. It might open up the possibility of discussing white, autochthonous privilege and normativity in many sports policy programmes. It would also render more explicit the constructed hierarchical racialiced/ethnicised character of contemporary, apparently value-free and objective governmental sport policy discourses. With regard to critical scholarly research, I would urge Dutch as well as international sport scholars to problematise in every new study the categorisations that they use and to ‘ground’ these categorisations in empirical research that is contextualised in time and place, instead of predefining them on the basis of past research that is often located in the US or (to a lesser extent) the UK. Studies that use predefined racial/ethnic categories in their research design could benefit from methods used in ethnographic case-study oriented approaches to sport. Those studies tend to locate the analysis of race and ethnicity at the micro level of sport into the larger framework of racialised/ethnicised power relations and discourses in the society at large that is being studied (van Sterkenburg et al., forthcoming). Authors such as Jackson (1998), Jamieson (1998) and Spencer (2004), for instance, deconstructed media representations surrounding sport celebrities and demonstrated that racial and ethnic meanings and categorisations are dependent on the convergence of temporal and situational factors as well as on the varied ‘ethnic standpoints’ from which they are constructed.4 Quantitatively oriented studies that are characterised by the use of categories should also continuously reflect on this convergence of temporal and situational factors and ethnic standpoints that help to shape (or challenge) racial/ethnic categorisations. This implies that researchers should explore


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the various racial/ethnic categorisations that might be relevant for the specific society under study throughout their analysis, instead of predefining one racial/ethnic categorisation based on previous studies and routinely applying that categorisation without reflection throughout the analytical process. In the Netherlands, for instance, several dominant racial/ethnic categorisations exist parallel to each other. These various categorisations should be explored throughout the analysis, along with possible alternative categorisations that appear to be relevant for the specific context or situation under study. This exploration and analytical use of a variety of categories throughout the analysis gives the researcher the opportunity to gain better insight into the diversity and different levels of racial/ethnic categories that are used to give meaning to and construct difference in the context under study. In addition, it encourages the researcher to reflect on the question of which categories are actually preferred and dominant in that context, and which are marginalised, and how that might relate to power relations in society at large.5 For a further elaboration on the possible use of such a contextual analysis in sport media research that uses racial/ ethnic categories, see van Sterkenburg et al., (forthcoming).

Conclusion In summary, then, I have drawn from a cultural studies perspective as well as insights from social cognition theory to critique the use of racial and ethnic categorisations in Dutch sports policy and everyday discourse as well as in some (quantitatively oriented) constructionist scholarly writing. I urge those using the racial/ethnic categorisations in sports research or sports policy to reflect on their use of categorisations and be open to the power relations and racialised/ethnicised standpoints from which these categorisations emerge. Situating racial/ethnic categorisations in the power dynamics of the time will result in more balanced (Dutch) sport policies. Such policies will not almost exclusively focus on the non-white allochtone Other, but also reflect on the dominance and normativeness of the white autochtone Self in sports policy and on the differences within and similarities between the categories of allochtonen and autochtonen. Although critical scholarly research in the area of sport and race/ethnicity have increasingly paid attention to white normativeness and the privilege of being ‘white’ in a white culture, some of this research can at the same time be criticised for ‘naturalising’ the status quo and confirming existing (US-oriented) racial/ ethnic hierarchies through their tendency to predefine race or ethnicity and, it seems routinely, follow categorisations used in previous studies. It is vital that race and ethnicity are problematised in every new study and that the use of categorisations is ‘grounded’ in the context under study, in order to avoid routinely reifying racial and ethnic categories.




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1. At the same time there are variations between cultures as to what ‘whiteness’ means. In the US, for instance, the socially constructed Hispanic population is often considered a ‘non-white ethnic minority group’ (Yancey, 2003), whereas it is considered a ‘white’ ethnic group in some British usages (O’Donnell, 2006). 2. Even though the Dutch government has praised Indische Nederlanders for their ‘silent assimilation’ into Dutch society (Captain and Ghorashi, 2001:162), it remains very questionable whether Indische Nederlanders themselves have benefitted economically or socially from this ‘successful assimilation’ into Dutch society (Captain and Ghorashi, 2001). 3. This shift in focus is most notable in countries like the UK where anti-racism initiatives in sport got off the ground much earlier than on the European continent. 4. Jackson (1998) critically studied the Canadian media representations of Ben Johnson, recognising the importance of contextual factors in the shifting racial and national signifiers of Johnson’s identity. Spencer (2004) identified the convergence of various cultural factors in 1990s North America in order to better understand the media representations of the Williams sisters in tennis. Jamieson (1998) demonstrated how US media texts from varied standpoints constructed the female Latina golf celebrity Nancy Lopez as a cultural marker of racialised, classed and sexualised statuses in US society and sport. 5. Although previous researchers have legitimised their use of already established categories by arguing that they seek consistency with previous studies for the sake of comparison or measuring progress (Denham et al., 2002), I would argue that the use of contextualised categorisations still provides scholars with this opportunity. Even though the specific racial/ethnic categorisations and labels can change across time and place, these categorisations generally have in common that they originate from a process of ‘othering’ that constructs the dominant racial/ethnic group as ‘the Self’ (often made normative) and the non-dominant ethnic groups as ‘the Other’. It becomes possible to compare the racial/ethic categories defined as the Self with those defined as the Other across contexts, even though the specific markers or categories of difference might differ. In discussing empirical results of such a comparison, the researcher should point out which categories actually constitute the Self and the Other in the various contexts and which markers of difference (ethnic, racial, religious) are played out and emphasised in the respective dominant discourses.


Notes


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Part II


Practices


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‘In This Shrinking World’: ‘Race’, the Olympics and the Wind of Change Stephen Wagg

Introduction The title of this chapter is taken from a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to the South African parliament in Cape Town in 1960. It rapidly became, and is still, known as the ‘wind of change speech’: ‘... in this shrinking world in which we live today’, observed Macmillan (1972: 157) at one point, ‘the internal policies of one nation may have effects outside it’. The phrase ‘shrinking world’ seems apt, since, long before social theorists began to wrangle over the term, it provided a good synonym for globalisation. In fact, Macmillan was referring more specifically, and more importantly, to the ongoing process of decolonisation – in Africa and elsewhere – and to the consequent emergence of independent postcolonial polities. These new polities already included the former British colonies of India, Pakistan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Ghana, with Nigeria shortly to follow; other decolonisations were under way. All these newly independent countries, Macmillan (1972: 476) suggested, would now choose between ‘the Western Powers’ and ‘the Communists’ for their political allegiance and their economic and strategic support. South Africa was numbered, in this context, among the ‘Western powers’, but with its policy of state racism, would be a virtually impossible ally for these new, largely ‘black’, nations. Macmillan, of course, did not use this term, but he was nevertheless quite blunt in his assertion, quoting from a speech by British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to the United Nations General Assembly the previous September, that ‘We [the British government] reject the idea of any inherent superiority of one race over another’ (Macmillan, 1972: 158). Anthony Sampson (Macmillan’s biographer) later wrote: ‘As it turned out, the speech probably had more influence in encouraging African nationalists elsewhere than in changing the South African situation’ (Sampson, 1968: 188). Indeed, a few weeks later, Macmillan (ibid.)


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himself could be found saying: ‘In Cape Town I spoke of the wind of change that was blowing through Africa. But that’s not the same thing as a howling tempest which would blow away the whole of a new developing civilisation. We must, at all costs, avoid that.’ South Africa became a republic and seceded from the British Commonwealth the following year. This chapter describes how the developments of which Macmillan spoke came to bring about the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. It examines the controversy, played out in the early 1960s, over whether South Africa should participate in the Olympic Games of 1964, in Tokyo; it then analyses the politics surrounding attempts to readmit South Africa to the Olympic movement in time for the Games of 1968 in Mexico. It draws heavily on coverage of the controversy surrounding these matters in The Times, then generally regarded as the organ of Establishment opinion in Britain. Through analysis of the Times commentary it is possible to chart the emergence of new political orthodoxies on ‘race’, on sport and on their intersection in British ruling circles. Thus the chapter is important to the present volume, for three reasons. First, it marks the beginning of a successful international challenge to racism in sport. To be sure, such a challenge was not in itself new: there had, after all been a huge campaign to boycott the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin because of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Germany, but ultimately this had not disturbed the prevailing orthodoxy that ‘sport’ and ‘politics’ should be kept apart. Second, while the American academic Richard Lapchick (1975) has provided an extensive history of the challenges to racism in South African sport, this chapter is more concerned with the specific circumstances, external to South Africa, in which a new political orthodoxy on racism in sport might emerge: in this regard, the ‘wind of change’ speech seems to have been a turning point. Third, and related to this, the chapter offers a glimpse of a new consensus taking shape on these matters among the British political elite. Historically, this elite had, after all, been hitherto the principal international definer, through its proprietorship of the amateur ethos, of the (albeit unacknowledged) politics of sport. Prominent writers on the Olympics seem, mistakenly, to have designated this watershed period as a time of pre-history. For instance, under ‘Boycotts’ in the index of marketing expert Michael Payne’s (2006) recent book Olympic Turnaround: How the Olympic Games Stepped Back from the Brink of Extinction to Become the World’s Best Known Brand there are only three references: Montreal (1972), Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984). This ignores not only the massive international campaign for a boycott of the aforementioned ‘Nazi Olympics’ in Berlin in 1936 (for example, see Guttman, 1983; Mandell, 1987; Kruger and Murray, 2003; Large, 2007), but also the significant movement of nations in the early 1960s to withdraw from the Tokyo Olympiad if South Africa were allowed to compete; these latter intimations were repeated in the late 1960s during the onset of the Mexico


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City Olympics. This, once again, was a manifestation of the sort of politics against which Harold Macmillan had warned in Cape Town.

Macmillan spoke at a time of high tide for Afrikaaner hegemony in South African politics. Indeed, as soon as Macmillan had sat down (Macmillan, 1972: 159), the South African Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, inserted into his vote of thanks an unscripted plea ‘for justice for the white man’. A month later Verwoerd told the South African parliament: ‘We do not accept that the white inhabitants must be satisfied as a minority in a multi-racial country to compete with the black masses on any equal basis, which in the long run can only mean a black government’ (cited in Hepple, 1967: 152). Verwoerd, Prime Minister since 1958, had been the chief architect of the policy of apartheid (‘separate development’ in Afrikaans) in his previous capacity of ‘Minister for Native Affairs’. Apartheid was a system of strict racial separation: black1 South Africans were not allowed to vote, to live in certain areas, to marry or associate with whites or to earn above a certain amount of money. While there were no laws directly restricting sport, there were nevertheless many which restricted the movement of black South Africans. These included the infamous Group Areas Act of 1950 and the (equally infamous) Pass Laws, designed to enforce segregation and to prevent non-white South Africans from entering specified areas. In March 1960, 69 members of a crowd protesting against these laws were shot dead by police in the African township of Sharpeville. In June of 1960, a little over four months after Macmillan’s speech and scarcely three after the Sharpeville massacre, a racially exclusive ‘white’ South African team competed in the summer Olympics in Rome. Comparatively few political eyebrows were raised at this, but opposition to racially segregated sport had begun to build, both in South Africa itself and in the wider world, in the late 1950s. This was against the grain of conventional politicking and the anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain (1996: 45) was surely right when he reflected: ‘In the early 1960s, sport might have appeared an unusual choice for political protest ...’. At this time it was still axiomatic across the political spectrum that sport was not political. This assumption was certainly not confined to Afrikaaner nationalists. Throughout the 1960s Olympic controversy over South Africa/’race’, for example, The Times carries almost no comment on the matter by a government minister. And there is no mention of sport in most conventional historical accounts of the political struggle of the African National Congress against apartheid (see for instance, Lodge, 1984; Ellis and Sechaba, 1992; McKinley, 1997). Anti-racist disquiet about the social conditions of South African sport could be traced at least as far back as 1947, when the International Table Tennis Federation had refused to recognise the (all white) South African


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Table Tennis Union (Archer and Bouillon, 1982: 186). Other black sport federations in South Africa, having applied unsuccessfully to join their national governing bodies, now began to lobby their respective international associations for similar exclusions. Progress on this issue was limited, however, partly because of the colonial sympathies of these associations but largely because there was no specific apartheid legislation on sport: this had facilitated some hypocritical buck-passing, with the national bodies arguing that they were bound by the law and the government claiming that no such law existed (ibid.: 189). Meanwhile, during the 1950s, the Afrikaner Nationalist government, chiefly in the person of Dr Ebenhaezer Donges, Minister of the Interior between 1948 and 1961, became increasingly interventionist in the realm of sport. Donges banned black boxers from South Africa in 1951 and in the late 1950s began to withdraw passports from black South African sportspeople. Domestic sporting opposition to apartheid had become steadily more organised during Donges’ period of office: a Committee of International Recognition formed in Durban having been established in 1955. This effectively became the South African Sports Association in 1958 and the emergence of the SASA was paralleled by the founding in the United Kingdom of the Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sport the same year. This gave an international dimension to organised resistance to racism in South African sport and the CARDS immediately challenged the participation of an exclusively white South African team in the Empire and Commonwealth Games staged that year in Cardiff. In 1960 Dennis Brutus, SASA secretary, was refused a passport to travel to Rome to lobby the International Olympic Committee and in 1963 the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee was set up. This was another crucial political landmark: whereas SASA had merely been demanding the right for black sportspeople to represent South Africa, SANROC called for completely non-racial sport (ibid.: 191). Equally importantly, in the same year the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid was established, meaning that anti-racism in sport now had official sanction at the highest level in international politics (Reddy, 1988). By this time the nationalist government had devised and begun to pursue a policy of attrition, aimed principally at promoting political division, notably between Asian, Coloured and black African sport organisations (Archer and Bouillon, 1982: 194–195).

Anti-Racism and the road to Tokyo: sport, Apartheid and The Times of London


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On 13 August 1964 it was announced that South Africa could not meet Olympic entrance criteria and would therefore not be competing in the summer Olympics, due to open in Tokyo in October of that year. It is fair to


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There is a hopeless inaccuracy in the comments by South African sports officials that to fulfil the IOC conditions would have meant ‘a virtual denial of the government’s policy of apartheid.’ Rubbish! It wouldn’t have been a ‘virtual denial’, it would have been a COMPLETE one. And the Verwoerd gangster gorillas could never have stood for that, even under the defensive shield of ‘sport’. It is likely that this position was untypical of the political consensus on this question, either on Fleet Street or in the corridors of British power. Britain’s most prestigious broadsheet, The Times, which had been documenting, and commenting upon, the political struggle leading up to South Africa’s exclusion throughout the year was almost certainly a better barometer in this regard. This coverage will now be charted. On 15 January 1964, in a tiny one-inch article at the foot of page four, The Times reported from Lausanne that the previous day South Africa had rejected a demand by the International Olympic Committee that they abolish apartheid in sport. They had nevertheless asked not to be excluded from the Tokyo Games. Otto Meyer, the IOC Chancellor, had said that there would be an official response after the IOC’s forthcoming meeting in Innsbruck on the 27th of the month. Doubtless the South African Olympic and National Games Association (SAONGA) were hoping that the IOC would continue to turn a blind eye to racial segregation in the country’s sport (Nauright, 1997: 136). Five days on and Times (21 January 1964: 8) readers were darkly reminded that more than simply relations between the ‘races’ might be at stake in South Africa. Nelson Mandela, leader of the then-banned African National Congress, was at the time on trial in Johannesburg; the paper now reported that Mandela’s diary not only detailed meetings with Hugh Gaitskell and Jo Grimond, the leaders respectively of the British Labour and Liberal parties, and Julius Nyerere, the proclaimed socialist president of newly independent Tanzania, but that Mandela had written of the end of capitalism in South Africa. Many Times readers knew well enough that apartheid procured a reservoir of cheap labour for South African capitalism, affording excellent investment opportunities for British business. On 27 January The Times trailed what would, in effect, be the IOC’s response to South Africa’s plea to be allowed to come to Tokyo. This came in the form of a speech to be delivered at the Innsbruck meeting by the American Avery Brundage, President of the IOC since 1952. Brundage had


say that this aroused little interest in the British press. A mere three inches were devoted to the story in the Daily Telegraph, and there was no mention of it in the Daily Mail. Only the Daily Mirror (13 August 1964, p. 19), still at that time maintaining a leftish populism, seemed at all animated by the subject:


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led resistance to calls for a boycott of the Games in Nazi Germany in 1936 (Guttmann, 1983). Beneath the headline SPOILED DARLINGS OF SPORT The Times (27 January 1964) reported that Brundage now proposed to say: ‘Today’s governments in many countries attempt to use sport in general, and the Olympic movement in particular, for personal and partisan ends.’ ‘The IOC and international sport federations’, Brundage would argue, now ‘had to devote an increasing proportion of their time to combating the intrusion of politics into sport.’2 Here, in a shrewd piece of politicking, Brundage reaffirmed the notion of the apolitical athlete – the mythic Olympic amateur, uncontaminated by ideological influence. This served two purposes in the situation which Brundage and the IOC were currently confronting. First, it made possible the representation of state racism in South Africa as yet another tiresome political squabble threatening to spoil the IOC’s purported festival of pure sport. Second, and perhaps more importantly for the IOC in the circumstances, it was a veiled rebuke to the organisers of the Games of the New Emergent Forces (GANEFO), held in Jakarta, Indonesia, in November the previous year. These games were a direct challenge to the IOC and its values. GANEFO had attracted over 2,000 athletes and 51 participant nations, principally the newly independent and/or socialist ones. On the next page, the same correspondent noted that the IOC had passed a resolution stating that the invitation to South Africa to come to that year’s summer Olympics ‘remains withdrawn’ but approving the resolve of the South African national Olympic committee ‘to send a fully representative team to Tokyo’. Trials, the article added, could even be held outside South Africa. ‘My feeling’, wrote the correspondent, ‘is that some sort of compromise will be achieved in time for entries to be submitted for Tokyo’. This latter formulation, whereby, in order to circumvent its own racist laws, a country might stage trials abroad so as to select ‘a fully representative’ national team might have struck some readers as absurd, but the writer nevertheless offered praise for the IOC and its ‘genius for compromise when politics impinge upon sport’. No resolution, the writer reported in closing, had been tabled over the GANEFO, but ‘word will be carried to the various international sporting federations that GANEFO events, organised for purely political purposes, are unlicensed and that athletes taking part in them could no longer be recognised’ [emphasis added] (27 January 1964: 4). Signs that this imputed ‘genius for compromise’ might be subject to unprecedented strain, however, emerged within days. The government of South Africa refused to accept a five person delegation from the United Nations, sent to discuss apartheid. The delegation, composed of representatives of the UK, Sweden, Ghana, Yugoslavia and Morocco was instructed to ‘examine methods of resolving the present situation in South Africa through full peaceful and orderly application of human rights to all inhabitants of the country as a whole, regardless of race, colour or creed and to consider what part the United Nations might play in the achievement of that end’


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(The Times, 7 February 1964: 9). This indicated the scale of difficulty now likely to be faced by Brundage and his school of Olympism. The UN was committed to opposing racism: in 1950, prompted largely by the antiSemitism of Nazi Germany, UNESCO, the UN’s educational, scientific and cultural arm, had issued a statement – The Race Question – which had stated that the notion of ‘race’ had no scientific validity (UNESCO, 1950). Moreover, since no specific item of apartheid legislation governed sport, proponents of non-racial sport in South Africa confronted a whole socialpolitical system, and not a particular law that might be tinkered with. The South African government thus characterised the UN delegation as ‘well known opponents of the South African policy of separate evolution’, which could not therefore be seen as ‘impartial’ (The Times, 7 February 1964: 9). Indeed, it might be added here that racially segregated sport was so fundamental to Verwoerd’s apartheid that it is remarkable that negotiation over South Africa’s admission to the Olympics should have lasted as long as it did: in September of 1965 an editorial in Die Transvaler, an organ of official Afrikaner nationalist opinion (cited in Archer and Bouillion, 1982: 194), stated: In South Africa the races do not mix on the sports field. If they mix first on the sports field, then the road to other forms of social mixing is wide open ... .With an eye to upholding the white race and its civilization not one single compromise can be entered into. In February 1964 it was announced that Otto Meyer had resigned as Chancellor of the IOC, citing, in effect, the wind of change now threatening established Olympic ideology. ‘Amateurism’, he said, had changed during his 18-year tenure and he now professed himself ‘tired of all the politics and the wrangling’. The question of South African participation in the Games was not, he claimed, his reason for resigning – ‘But it is situations like this that have come to make the job really unbearable’ (The Times, 14 February 1964: 8). In early March, Meyer, now working out his notice, announced in Lausanne that South Africa ‘must make a public statement in the press and over the radio that they are willing to abide by the Olympic rules if they want to compete in the Games in Tokyo in October’ and that their participation or otherwise hinged solely on this (The Times, 7 March 1964: 8). Whatever Brundage, Meyer and their colleagues may have been expecting, the South African government immediately made clear that no such statement would be forthcoming. Two days later, at the opening of the South African Games, the country’s president, Charles Swart, said ‘South Africans fervently desire to have our athletes compete in the international Olympic Games and we still hope this may be accomplished’. He then referred to ‘a distressing attitude towards sport in South Africa encountered in the outside




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world’, to ‘misinformed critical attacks’ and to ‘various forms of political manoeuvring and even malice’. ‘We in South Africa’, he went on, ‘will continue to promote what we consider to be the best interests of sport in our country for all sections of our community’ (The Times, 9 March 1964: 9). Now, in the spring of 1964, the South African government embarked on a period of retrenchment and appeals to Western realpolitik, much of it zealously chronicled in The Times. A couple of days after Swart’s speech, ‘Minister for Justice’ Johannes Vorster claimed that Spear of the Nation, described by the paper as ‘the terrorist arm of the outlawed African National Congress’, had been destroyed (The Times, 11 March 1964: 10). Twenty-four hours later South Africa withdrew from the International Labour Organisation (The Times, 12 March 1964: 11). In late April The Times quoted at some length from a speech by Dr Verwoerd, defying his international critics. Beneath the headlines S. AFRICA WILL NOT YIELD/ APARTHEID ONLY POLICY/ DR VERWOERD’S REPLY he is reported as saying that ‘the white nation, which was born here, which developed the country and which brought prosperity not only to itself but also for the non-white races living here should survive’. ‘So far as the survival of the white nation was concerned’, wrote ‘Our own correspondent’, ‘the Government was steadfast and unyielding’ (The Times, 24 April 1964: 11). (The vocabulary of heroism employed here – ‘steadfast’, ‘unyielding’ – is hard to miss.) Next day Verwoerd offered to appoint a ‘roving ambassador’ to tour ‘the capitals of friendly African states’ – those ‘prepared’, as The Times put it, ‘to open good-neighbour relations and abandon threats, boycotts and “undermining attitudes”.’ A roving ambassador, according to Verwoerd, was all that South Africa could afford – it did not have the money to fund diplomatic representation in all countries, even all the African ones (The Times, 25 April 1964: 8). Forty-eight hours later, somewhat in contradiction of this, Verwoerd declared: ‘Economically we are so strong that it will not pay other countries to seek an economic conflict with us.’ The key to this, he argued, was oil – South Africa had large natural deposits of it and many other countries did not: ‘South Africa’s enemies would find it more difficult to apply and maintain an oil boycott than for South Africa to overcome it.’ Besides, the West, he felt confident, would not allow South Africa to be ‘lost to communism’ (The Times, 27 April 1964: 10). On 26 June the IOC offered South Africa ‘one last chance to renounce racial discrimination in sport’, giving them until 16 August to do so. Jan de Klerk, South African Minister of the Interior, countered immediately that his government could not in any circumstances approve the representation of South Africa by ‘mixed teams’ in international sports tournaments. This position was officially reaffirmed four days before the IOC’s stipulated deadline: the South African national Olympic committee stated the already widely iterated and wholly self-evident – that to comply with the IOC’s request would mean ‘a virtual denial of the Government’s policy


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of apartheid’ (SOUTH AFRICA OUT OF OLYMPICS, The Times, 13 August 1964: 5). The IOC’s preparedness to go on flogging this plainly dead horse is testament to the determination of its traditionalist faction and also to its obliviousness to new political realities. In between these two refusals of the IOC’s request it had perhaps begun to dawn on Times writers that this matter was more complex than they had supposed. Hitherto they had rendered it as a confrontation between steadfast white governance and those – excitable students and others – who wished to import politics to where it did not belong. In mid-July, for example, the paper noted the conclusion reached at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference that ‘race relations’ was now one of the most important issues facing the Commonwealth; they had called for equal opportunity and an end to discrimination (The Times, 16 July 1964: 11). A month later, with South Africa’s exclusion from the Tokyo Games confirmed, a new political approach was glimpsed, which called on the opponents of apartheid to show greater subtlety and forbearance in what was now tacitly acknowledged to be a problem. ‘A Special Correspondent’ wrote from South Africa (The Times, 18 August 1964: 9): It does not help when ploys of Mr Fenner Brockway, Mrs Barbara Castle [leading Labour Party campaigners against apartheid] and others have the effect of tarring all white South Africans with the same brush. Mrs Castle once suggested in a letter to The Times that a sports team should, in order to protest against apartheid, refuse to tour South Africa. This approach ... may be calculated to drive whites here against the wall. Mrs Castle must encourage her teams to visit South Africa, to judge for themselves, to take back facts so that they and those they contact in their lives may begin to think constructively. This was a foretaste of what would become a popular argument on the British right in favour of somehow ‘engaging’ with apartheid South Africa. On 16 November, however, one month into the first Labour government Britain had had for thirteen years, a Times editorial went considerably further, now expressing abhorrence of apartheid, but purporting to temper this abhorrence with political realism. Beginning with a discussion of how Harold Wilson, now Prime Minister, could make good his promise, made while still Leader of the Opposition, not to sell military equipment to South Africa ‘without lost orders or hidden subsidies’, the editorial moved swiftly to the morality of apartheid, a subject noticeably absent from previous discourse on the South African state (The Times, 16 November 1964:11):



Repugnance towards apartheid is shared by all three parties in Britain. It is not a Labour monopoly. Citizens of almost every shade of opinion hope that sooner or later – and the sooner the better, not least for


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the South Africans themselves – the day will come on which the South African republic emerges from the dark tunnel down which it has been travelling for so long. But agreement on this does not lead in logic or in common sense to a demand for indiscriminate action. The present regime in South Africa is an evil and a sterile one, holding out no hope for posterity, white or black. But it is not unique in standing for things which outrage the British sense of justice and decency in human relationships. There are other evil regimes up and down the world. There always have been and only an optimist would expect that there will cease to be in any foreseeable future. While the claim that revulsion at apartheid was shared across the parties was overstated and the overall argument was deployed in favour of trade with South Africa, The Times, unofficial organ of the British ruling class, now, crucially, drew a distinction between the economic and strategic importance to Britain of white apartheid South Africa and its culture. The latter was characterised as a ‘dark tunnel’ and its political representatives as ‘evil’. The editorial also reaffirmed the Brundage doctrine of gathering various undesirable regimes together for blanket condemnation – implicitly equating state racism with, say, communism or dictatorship. In order to pursue an inclusive and expansionist line the IOC had to maintain a diplomatic balance between the ‘Western powers’, the communist countries under the presumed tutelage of the Soviet Union and the emergent nations – the three power blocs identified by Macmillan in Cape Town in 1960. With Tokyo approaching, the Games of the New Emergent Forces pointed up the difficulties here. The issue raised by the GANEFO was one of exclusion: neither Taiwan/ Formosa nor Israel had been admitted to the Jakarta event. On 26 September it was reported that the Japanese government, now firmly aligned with the ‘Western powers’, had instructed the Tokyo organising committee to ensure that GANEFO athletes did not compete in the Games (The Times, 26 September 1964: 3). The Times (10 October 1964: 3) praised IOC members Brundage and the British Conservative politician Lord Exeter for standing firm against a ‘hysterical lobby’ and argued that they had simply tried to get these two countries to ‘abide by the rules’. Twenty-one GANEFO nations had, it added, omitted their ineligible athletes for Tokyo (Senn, 1999, pp. 126–133). Perhaps Times leader writers saw this as the latest example of the IOC’s genius for compromise. No doubt, too, Brundage and the IOC were glad to have thus minimised the damage to the Games caused by the GANEFO controversy and to have kept so many emergent nations on board. However, for those (including Brundage) who hoped to readmit a politically unreconstructed South Africa to the Olympics, two important things were now clear. First, the IOC had moved against Indonesia and the GANEFO countries on the basis that they had discriminated against certain competitor nations on


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political grounds, thus breaching the Olympic charter. Anti-racist groups would inevitably now tax the IOC with this renewed emphasis in Olympic doctrine on discrimination, making it even more difficult than it already was to broker a return to the Olympics for apartheid South Africa. Second, by the time of the next Olympic Games, there would be still more ‘emergent forces’ to accommodate and, with the United Nations having now established South Africa as a pariah state and growing international opposition to racism, an invitation to South Africa to participate in the 1968 Games would surely invite a huge boycott. So it was to prove.

Year of destiny: the 1968 olympics & the South Africa question 1968 is the year in which, for the International Olympic Committee, the wind of change became a gale, finding them prepared only for a stiff breeze. In the pages of The Times the political transactions leading up to the Mexico Games were chronicled with a cautious multi-racialism, at times sympathetic to South Africa’s readmission (under special conditions), but increasingly aware both of the new political realities of international sport and of the frequent contradictions in the IOC’s position on the issue. In late January of 1968, The Times (29 January 1968: 4) carried a sympathetic profile of the South African Dennis Brutus, a leading campaigner against apartheid – something virtually unthinkable at the beginning of the decade. Brutus, on his way to Grenoble to lobby the IOC for South Africa’s continued exclusion from the Games, was described, approvingly, as a ‘quietly spoken schoolmaster and poet’. A day or two later an IOC commission, led by Lord Killanin, reported on its recent visit to South Africa to assess that country’s sporting arrangements. Since these arrangements had not changed and since Killanin and his team seem to have made that clear (Landry et al., 1991: 542), it dismayed many emergent Olympic nations that the IOC should nevertheless resolve to take a vote at their February meeting in Grenoble on whether South Africa should be invited to Mexico City. The Times, though, despite acknowledging that Killanin had actually made no recommendations, declared that (31 January 1968: 12) ‘those delegates who have an open mind may feel that Lord Killanin and his colleagues suggest that it is possible for South Africa to be represented by a multi-racial team in Mexico’. Some readers may have wondered what ground there might be for maintaining this ‘open mind’ on the South Africa question and this argument took a positively Alice in Wonderland quality when correspondent John Hennessey reported that the IOC ballot would proceed even though the South African government had said they would not permit multi-racial Olympic trials, either inside the country or elsewhere. Hennessey implied that he was in favour of the ballot, but, importantly, with some moral misgiving: ‘I confess to a personal shift of opinion since I arrived here [Grenoble] but I am




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still haunted by the use of “we” and “they” by one eminent South African spokesman when he was in fact referring in both cases to his own countrymen’ (The Times, 3 February 1968: 6). On 16 February, it was reported that, somewhat improbably given South Africa’s intransigence and the wind of change now gusting through the Olympic movement, that seventy-one IOC members had voted (in a postal ballot) to allow South Africa to compete in October, so long as they complied with Fundamental Principle One of the Olympic Code: that competitors are amateur and that the selection process permits no discrimination on grounds of race, religion or political affiliation. The South African team, it was proposed, would be a single unit and would travel as one; it would wear the same uniform; its members would be allowed to compete against each other in Mexico; and it would be assembled by a multi-racial selection committee (The Times, 16 February 1968: 1). On 17 February, the day after South Africa’s participation was announced, Ethiopia and Algeria withdrew from the forthcoming Olympiad. Mr Yidnekatchew Tessema, Secretary General of the Ethiopian Sports Confederation, pointed to the apparent absurdity of this proposed suspension of state racism in South Africa: ‘What happens after the Games?’ he asked. The Times, somewhat lamely, cited the anti-racist credentials of Lord Killanin. Ethiopia’s withdrawal, however, meant that Abebe Bikila, winner of the marathon in both Rome and Tokyo, would not be defending his title (The Times, 17 February 1968: 1). With the Olympics now established as a television event, this was a further factor for the IOC to consider when contemplating a haemorrhage of emergent nations. Further, in an editorial the same day the paper referred to ‘The American Negro assault on the New York Athletic Club’ (ibid.: 9). This club, of which many leading US Olympians were members, was reputed to operate a colour bar (application for membership was by invitation only and it had no black members) and this mention of a recent protest against the NYAC was an acknowledgement of the campaign of the anti-racist Olympic Project for Human Rights (Hartmann, 2003), which had raised the possibility of an internal boycott of the Mexico Games by African-American athletes. The paper (17 February 1968: 9) appealed for a more gradualist approach: To insist that the Olympic code immediately requires selection to be the result of inter-racial athletic competition within South Africa is to insist that white and black boxers must be free to fight each other there, and this, however desirable, is crying for the moon. On the other hand South Africa’s reactions show once again that sport has a peaceable leverage greater than any other available to the outside world. South Africa is now visibly being forced to behave abroad as she should at home. On balance it seems wisest to occupy the ground gained in the Olympic decision, hold the Games successfully and go on from there.


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At that moment, however, South Africa harboured hopes of going back to imperial times rather than going on. On 19 February Frank Braun, President of the South African National Olympic Committee, wished good riddance to the boycotting nations: ‘They form their own Afro Asian games instead of competing at the Olympics. That should restore the old prestige of the Games’ (The Times, 19 February 1968: 1). Two days on and a number of other countries had seceded. These included Kenya and this meant, as The Times reminded its readers, that television audiences would be robbed of another star attraction: 28-year-old Kipchoge Keino, the favourite for the men’s 1,500 metres in Mexico. ‘I do not mind running against anybody’, Keino was quoted as saying. ‘But if I am told I cannot run against certain people, I will not.’ The Times seized this as evidence both of the willingness of black athletes to go to Mexico regardless of South African participation there and of political interference with their right to do so: Those countries which support the invitation to South Africa have not been very vocal so far. But they can now point to Kenya as an example of Government direction in sport and also claim, through the remarks of Keino, that coloured sportsmen want to go to Mexico with or without South Africa (The Times, 21 February 1968: 14). Brundage, too, spoke with apparently unwarranted optimism about the South Africa initiative, claiming in a speech in Madrid that ‘the Olympic movement had scored a great victory in South Africa that no other force, however powerful it might be, had achieved so far’ (The Times, 22 February 1968: 14). But, with withdrawals now coming thick and fast, the recently dismissive Braun now calling for a reconsideration of the boycott (ibid.) and African Olympic committees due to meet in the Congolese capital of Brazzaville, an article by John Hennessey pronounced 1968 the YEAR OF DESTINY FOR THE OLYMPIC MOVEMENT. Although fewer than 15% of Olympic countries had so far joined ‘the revolt’, the combined effects of GANEFO and ‘the Negro Olympic revolt in the United States’ compelled him to suggest: ‘It is not too melodramatic to suggest that the Olympic movement may be suffering the agony of death throes’ (The Times, 23 February 1968: 9). Soon it was confirmed that at Brazzaville the Council for Sports in Africa had called on all thirty-two member states to boycott Mexico. Italy appealed to the IOC to think again (The Times, 27 February 1968: 1). Two days on and India had withdrawn, Caribbean countries were said to be considering boycotting and a headline (29 February 1968: 13) read US NEGROES REJECT OLYMPIC TRIALS – a reference to American basketball players. At the beginning of March, undeterred, South Africa set up a multi-racial sporting committee (The Times, 1 March 1968: 12) and The Times once again fell in




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behind the IOC initiative, reporting that non-white South Africans were opposed to the boycott (4 March, 1968: 10). On 6 March another massive blow was delivered to the IOC strategy, with the Soviet Union announcing support for the boycott and calling the IOC decision to invite South Africa ‘a challenge to all public opinion, fraught with serious consequences to the very Olympic movement and placing the Nineteenth Games in jeopardy’. The same day the Lebanese Olympic committee suggested that all Arab countries would stay away from Mexico (The Times, 6 March 1968: 14). The Times, still tentatively in favour of South Africa’s inclusion and reflexively suspicious of the USSR, nevertheless acknowledged that ‘whether to support the Afro-Asian boycott is a difficult decision for the Soviet Union, with loyalty to Afro-Asian friends, the need to adhere to its proclaimed principles, and the prestige of its sportsmen painfully intertwined’ (ibid.). Cancellation of the Mexico Games, it was claimed, was now under consideration (The Times, 7 March 1968: 11). Hennessey reported that the Soviet Union was likely to reconsider its participation in the coming Games if the IOC did not convene an emergency session. He also quoted African American athlete Ralph Boston, long jump gold medallist in the Rome Olympics, as saying that the Games would lose credibility if the Soviet Union were to withdraw. ‘Nor’, observed Hennessey, ‘is Boston one of the firebrands’ (The Times, 8 March 1968: 11). On 13 March, beneath the headline ‘AN INCENTIVE FOR NON-WHITES: Jubilation in South Africa’, Derek du Plessis in Johannesburg provided one last expression of the view, popular in The Times and doubtless in the British Conservative Party, that having South Africa in the Mexico Games would ultimately benefit black South Africans and undermine ‘hard line’ Afrikaner nationalists (The Times, 13 March 1968: 16): Ignoring the boycotts which have greeted South Africa’s reinstatement, South Africans – both white and non-white – are looking forward eagerly to the Olympic Games in Mexico. [The South African Olympic team] will travel together, live together, march under the same flag together and wear the same colours. These are the conditions laid down by the IOC. The decision has been greeted with much jubilation by many people here, although there are those right wing Nationalists who feel that the selection of a mixed team is the thin end of the wedge in the policy of separate development. These nationalist fears were also, of course, purportedly the hopes of the proponents of South Africa’s inclusion in the Olympics. But too many members of the Olympic family now dissented from this view for the IOC to proceed. The choice was now between cancellation of the Mexico Games – possibly throwing the future of the Olympic movement itself into doubt – and a rescinding of the invitation to South Africa to compete. In


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early April, in a letter to Brundage, Giulio Onesti, President of the Italian national Olympic committee challenged the legality of the IOC’s decision to admit South Africa (The Times, 3 April 1968: 15) and ten days later the Soviet Union repeated its call for this decision to be reversed (The Times, 13 April 1968: 1). In The Times, Hennessey now seemed to acknowledge both the gathering storm and the contentious nature of the arguments that had precipitated it. He quoted rumours that, since ‘right wing nationalists’ in South Africa objected to non-whites wearing the Springbok emblem, a new blazer badge was now being designed. He also supported the Soviet argument that the use by the IOC of a postal ballot in the procuring a vote for South Africa’s inclusion had been unconstitutional: ‘The rules allow for such a ballot only when time presses.’ Finally, and most importantly, Hennessey confronted the elephant in the room: the basis, within the terms of the IOC’s own resolution, for inviting South Africa in the first place. This resolution, tabled by the Australian Hugo Weir, had been in three parts. Part 1 had noted ‘with grave concern that racially discriminating internal policies of the South African Government prevent the national Olympic committee of that country from fully achieving the aims of the IOC ...’, while Part 3 had welcomed a team from that same committee ‘on the understanding that it continues vigorously its efforts to have all forms of racial discrimination in amateur sport removed ...’. ‘The first and third sentences are surely irreconcilable ...’, wrote Hennessey with belated clarity. ‘By the rules of the Olympic movement there is no more to be said. South Africa are ineligible’ (The Times, 13 April 1968: 11). To many parties to the controversy this had always been self-evident and the invitation to South Africa had required IOC members to ignore their own conditions for making it. Perhaps with such doubters in mind, Hennessey added (ibid.) an attempted rationale: Sympathizers of South Africa, and even non-sympathizers, may reasonably argue that the concessions wrung from them in the projected composition of their team for Mexico City strike a blow for liberal thought and for the welfare of their non-white population. It was on these grounds, indeed, that The Times approved of the decision at the time. But this is an argument that Mr Brundage and Lord Exeter, and those who think like them, can hardly use. They cannot at one moment renounce political motives (as they rightly do) and at the other claim credit for a ‘dent in apartheid.’



This rationale contains two important propositions. One is that if a racist regime is obliged to suspend its policies of racial discrimination for the purposes of a sports tournament then the victims of this discrimination could benefit politically. This was doubtful and blew counter to the emergent, wind-of-change consensus. The other was that, ultimately, politics


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could not be divorced from sport. This notion was in keeping with the new consensus, although the attendant controversy was, arguably, not laid to rest until the Moscow Olympics of 1980, when a boycott campaign was mounted by Western governments – that is, those previously wedded to this divorce. The Times elaborated on this theme following the expulsion of South Africa in late April. A leader article headed ‘OLYMPIC SOMERSAULT’ (The Times, 23 April 1968: 11) suggested that the expulsion ‘frankly bows to the political realities of the world racial conflict. The IOC ... underestimated the odium in which South Africa is held’. It also cited the assassination of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King in early April as a factor. It went on: ‘Many people regret that international sport cannot be dissociated from politics. It never was wholly possible. The IOC, it has been pointed out, reflects more the earlier time than the harsh present. In yielding to a worldwide pressure the IOC will best serve the Olympic movement in its modern context.’

Conclusion In summary, then, South Africa’s exclusion from the Olympics had come about, firstly, through the march of decolonisation and the consequent growth, and changed political complexion, of the Olympic movement. This new political configuration was manifested in the threatened boycotts of 1964 and 1968 and, eventually, in a new orthodoxy, as expressed by President Sukarno of Indonesia: ‘Let us declare frankly that sport has something to do with politics’ (cited in Guttmann, 1983: 228). The Games of the New Emergent Forces, which Sukarno had effectively launched with this remark, would undoubtedly have grown at the expense of the Olympics, had South Africa come to Mexico and these Games, it should be remembered, already had the support of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union’s rival for leadership of the global left. The final factor – acknowledged by Hennessey of The Times – was the growth of ‘race’ as an issue in international politics. This linked to the Cold War: Western nations that failed publicly to confront racism risked losing support among the emergent nations in the fight against communism.

Notes 1. The term ‘black’ is employed in this chapter as a kind of shorthand and refers, in effect, to all those – Asians, ‘Coloureds’ and black people – designated as non-white in apartheid South Africa. 2. Speech delivered the previous day in Innsbruck. Full text available at: http://www. la84foundation.org/OlympicInformationCenter/OlympicReview/1964/BDCE86/ BDCE86j.pdf, accessed 18 July 2009.


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4 Sam Ramsamy

Do not deceive yourself into thinking that racialism is just another tyranny, like political tyranny, or religious tyranny. I know many men who have changed their religion, and many who have changed their politics. But I know of no man who has changed his race. And that is the way to Armageddon. For racialism is the only absolute tyranny. Chief Albert Luthuli – South Africa – Recipient of Nobel Peace Prize 1960

Introduction South Africa has been the only country in recent history to have practised race discrimination and race domination on an institutionalised basis. Because of this policy, race discrimination and race domination were entrenched in all walks of life – including land allocation, residential restrictions, health services, job reservation, religious service, education and sport. The population of the country was basically divided into four race groups: Europeans, Africans, Coloureds and Indians. Voting at elections was reserved exclusively for the ruling European group, which controlled all aspects of life in South Africa, and it was this group which could represent the country at any international forum, including sport. The early definition of race separation was to identify the groups as Europeans and Non-Europeans (Africans, Coloureds and Indians). This was later changed to Whites and Non-Whites, as the word ‘Europeans’ confused white American visitors. The ruling White government also created a pecking order among the NonWhite groups. The Coloureds were given some privileges to differentiate them from the Africans and Indians; and the Indians were given a few privileges to differentiate them from the Africans. So the pecking order was Coloureds, then Indians and last, with little or no privileges, Africans. Initially all race groups practised sport separately, and only the White group, as defined by government policy, could represent South Africa at


The Post-Apartheid Scenario in South Africa

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international events. Although the three Non-White groups practised their sport separately, they merged together at regional and national levels by forming so-called Inter-Race Boards that later merged into non-racial sports organisations. Whites, however, had the exclusive privilege of representing the country at all international events. Although Whites took part in so-called international competitions in the late 1800s, it was only in 1908 that South African sport was formally structured and recognised, with the country taking part in the 1908 London Olympic Games. From then until 1960, South Africa’s representation at the Olympic Games was exclusively white. South Africa was not allowed to take part in the Olympic Games thereafter, and it was finally expelled from the Olympic Movement in May 1970 when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) withdrew its recognition. However, two black South Africans who were working at a trade fair in St Louis had competed as individuals in the marathon at the 1904 Olympic Games. Despite having few and much inferior facilities, several black sportsmen registered far better performances than white athletes, but they were not allowed to represent South Africa. Some left the country. Ron Elland (weightlifting) represented Great Britain at the 1948 London Olympic Games and Precious McKenzie (weightlifting) represented Great Britain and later New Zealand at several Olympic Games. Tennis star Jasmat Dhiraj emigrated to England and Basil D’Oliveira became a cricket legend in England. Several footballers followed suit. Albert Johannson became a regular member of the Leeds United team, then one of the top football clubs in Britain. He was the first black footballer to play in an FA Cup Final in Wembley in 1965, when Leeds lost to Liverpool. Papwa Sewgolum, a most talented golfer, was unable to compete in South Africa. A magnanimous white sponsor, Graham Wulff, took him to Europe, where Papwa won the prestigious Dutch Open in 1959, 1960 and 1964. For a fleeting period the apartheid government, probably in its attempt to appease the IOC which was on the verge of excluding South Africa from the Olympic Games, gave permission for him to compete with whites and, despite his ‘wrong-arm’ grip, he won the Natal Open twice, on one occasion dramatically beating the great Gary Player. But Papwa was soon banned from playing in tournaments with whites. Forcibly moved from his home under apartheid’s race-oriented residential laws, the Group Areas Act, and unable to sustain his career, he died penniless as an alcoholic (Nicholson 2005). In 1961, South Africa changed its constitutional status and became a republic, and was forced to leave the Commonwealth because of its racial policies. It soon strengthened its racial laws which, by now, had become known the world over as ‘apartheid’, and the plight of black sportsmen and women worsened. Support by most European and North American countries initially provided solace for white South Africa. However, with growing pressure from African, East European, Nordic and some Asian countries,


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combined with campaigns by anti-apartheid organisations world-wide, many international federations were compelled to either expel South Africa or suspend it from international competition. The virtual isolation from international sport had a devastating effect on South Africa’s white population. The apartheid Government thereafter tried various and numerous adjustments, including modifying some laws for sports events, to appease the international federations. In the early 1970s the apartheid government engaged upon a massive international campaign to break out of isolation. Huge sums of money were expended to appease international opinion and to portray anti-apartheid opposition as being manipulated by communists. (The communist scare created by the so-called West in Europe and North America was then at its height.) Bogus pro-South African organisations, including those campaigning for the re-entry of sport into the international arena, were established in several overseas countries. These failed dismally.

Movements towards the new South Africa The international political scenario changed drastically during the 1980s. International protests against apartheid intensified. Militancy intensified in South African townships. Nelson Mandela, who was incarcerated in Robben Island, South Africa’s dreaded political prison, was moved, together with a few of his fellow prisoners, first to one prison and then to another on the mainland. Prior to the release of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC) initiated talks with several white progressive groups in South Africa. White sports officials, sensing the partially liberalising attitude of the apartheid government, also held discussions with the ANC, which was still in exile. The IOC’s Commission on Apartheid and Olympism met with members of South Africa’s non-racial sports movement and the white Olympic Committee, which still existed as an entity although not recognised by the IOC. Mandela and all political prisoners were eventually released in February 1990. This short account of the interface between sport and apartheid cannot do full justice to the complexities of the processes involved, but many accounts already exist, including my own (Ramsamy, 2004). The focus of this chapter is on developments since the end of apartheid was signalled. Movements to reintegrate South African sport into the international arena began in earnest in July 1991, when the IOC, with enthusiastic support from the African National Congress (ANC), gave recognition to the newly formed National Olympic Committee of South Africa (NOCSA). Other international sports federations followed suit. South Africa was invited to take part in the 1992 Olympic Games held in Barcelona, and the 1993 Cricket World Cup held in Australia. There was some opposition both inside and outside the country for allowing South Africa to participate in international sport




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well in advance of the democratic elections scheduled for 1994, as the beneficiaries were largely, if not exclusively, the previously privileged and the uniquely enfranchised white sector of the population. But the ANC, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, encouraged international participation as this would assist in the integration of Whites into the whole population. In fact the ANC made no secret of the fact that it intended to use sport to unite the racially divided nation.

Restructuring of South African sport At that time sport was still organised primarily along racial lines. However, international federations insisted that single non-racial bodies must be formed before acceptance. The white-run bodies, because of the privileges and support provided by the apartheid regime, were better organised and funded. As a result, most of the black organisations were completely absorbed by the white bodies in the establishment of the new non-racial structures. Sports like cricket and rugby remained white with token black representation. Football and a few other sports remained in black hands; and in NOCSA and the National Sport Council (NSC), although most of its affiliates were white organisations, a strong black leadership was in control.

Internal dilemma and national unrest Elaborate preparations were soon under way for South Africa’s participation in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. But several major issues emerged. The team were to be composed predominantly, if not exclusively, of white athletes, although the IOC insisted that the team should have a substantial black representation. ANC President, Nelson Mandela, and NOCSA held a meeting with the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, to work out a formula. Nelson Mandela and the then IOC President, Juan Antonio Samaranch, agreed that South Africa should have a ‘development’ sector composed of young black athletes who would march together with the selected athletes during the Opening Ceremony. No sooner had Mandela returned from Switzerland than a largescale massacre took place in Boipatong, a black township just outside Johannesburg, killing more than 150 innocent men, women and children. Shaun Johnson (1994: 197), a reporter for the Star newspaper, recounted:


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A horrendous massacre in the township of Boipatong briefly revived the outright racial animosity of the 1980s. Residents blamed the Inkatha [a Zulu-based political party] hostel-dwellers – and the white government.


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Covertly, elements of the security police and military intelligence were providing the Inkatha terrorists with guns. The objective was quite clear: to provoke the ANC into a series of mini-civil wars in the townships and render the planned new order ungovernable. (Carlin 2008: 109) There were protests nationally, supported by many members of the ANC. Mass opinion indicated that South Africa should not now send a team to the Barcelona Olympic Games, as this would merely boost white dominance. However, peace eventually reigned and South Africa’s first non-racial team paraded in Barcelona, winning two silver medals.

Democratic elections and inauguration South Africa’s first democratic elections were held on 27–28 April 2004: and on 10 May Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as President. As part of the celebrations, a football match between South Africa and Zambia was staged at the Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg. The stage was now finally set for reconstruction and development.

The Springbok emblem All countries participating in international sports events identify themselves with a logo or emblem on their competition kit. But not all sports carry the same emblem. South Africa was, and continues to be, almost unique – it has a single emblem. During the apartheid years all teams and individuals competing internationally received the so-called ‘Springbok Colours’. But the Springbok emblem was reserved exclusively for whites as part of the apartheid heritage, so as to preserve white identity and political dominance in sport. For this reason, the Springbok was intensely hated by all black people: it was a source of indignation. The new South African sports movement adopted the country’s national flower, the Protea, as its sole emblem for sports teams and individuals. This presented a serious dilemma for South Africa’s rugby team, which was known the world over as the ‘Springboks’. South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, had to intervene to allow the original name to be retained.


It was widely rumoured that the apartheid government aided and abetted Inkatha in creating turmoil and violence to thwart an ANC victory in the elections to come, and many Blacks were also convinced by the rumours.

Carlin (2008: 170) explained: ‘... You would not believe it. People like Arnold Stofile (present Minister of Sport and Recreation). They came and attacked me [Mandela]! So I


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Rugby World Cup in South Africa The scene was now set for the staging of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. It has since been widely acknowledged that President Nelson Mandela and the ANC tried to exploit the parading of the Springbok team and its mass support by the white population to cement unity of all the country’s race groups. The slogan ‘One Team, One Country’ created by the then CEO of South African Rugby, Edward Griffiths, was the perfect platform to launch Mandela’s campaign. The campaign was further enhanced when a black player, Chester Williams, was included in an otherwise all white Springbok squad. At the time not many were aware of Mandela’s campaign to utilise the Springbok team’s participation in the Rugby World Cup for accelerating racial integration. During the initial stages of the tournament there was widespread indifference amongst most Blacks. Interest and excitement only arrived when the Springboks reached the final. There was jubilation at the final whistle when South Africa became Rugby World Cup Champions. The Blacks gave an African connotation to the name ‘Springbok’. They were called the ‘Amabokoboko’. Carlin (2008: 245) recorded the happenings most vividly: Reports washed in from the affluent suburbs of Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Johannesburg that white matrons were shedding generations of prejudice and restraint and hugging their black housekeepers, dancing with them on the leafy streets of prim neighbourhoods like Houghton. For the first time, the parallel apartheid worlds had merged, the two halves had been made whole, but nowhere more manifestly so than in Johannesburg itself, and especially around Ellis Park [the venue for the final], where the Rio carnival met the liberation of Paris in a riot of Springbok green. One old man stood in the middle of the road outside the stadium waving a South African flag, shouting over and over again, ‘South Africa is now free. The Boks have made us free, and proud.’...


called them in one by one and I briefed them. I explained to them the situation.’ ... and after some hand-wringing, Stofile, informed by Mandela that there was a matter of national security involved, caved in. And the Springbok was retained for use by South Africa’s national rugby team.

Archbishop Tutu, who also had a keen nose for news agreed. The black celebrations were the story. ‘What we saw that day was a revolution,’ said Tutu, joyous that he lived to see his country give birth to a new model of revolution, one in which the enemy was eliminated, he was brought into the fold; that instead of dividing a people, uniting them.


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From the moment that Mandela was elected president of the country, the three words ringing in the ears of the majority of the ruling political party – the ANC – were Reconciliation, Transformation and Reconstruction. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up and machinery to level the playing fields was established. 16 December had been for many years a public holiday, created by South Africa’s white government to commemorate the defeat of the Zulu King, Dingaan, and his mighty army by the Afrikaner settlers. The new government has now named it ‘Reconciliation Day’. The intention was that it should create and commemorate national unity, as does Thanksgiving Day in the United States. However, many commentators still believe that efforts at reconciliation have not yet touched the nerves of many whites. To them, reconciliation only means that the crimes of the past have been erased, and there is no need to assist in the raising of standards of living for blacks. This notion has also permeated into sport.

Levelling the playing fields The aim of highlighting the elements of transformation and reconstruction was to hasten the process of providing equal opportunities for all South Africans. The affluence of the previously advantaged white community meant they were able to monopolise the use of sports facilities, and consequently, opportunities for blacks to participate in many sports remained restricted, not by legislation but by the lack of facilities or by monetary problems. To this day South Africa’s national sports representation, with the exception of a few sports, is largely white. Addressing this matter became the responsibility primarily of black sports administrators and black politicians. When President Thabo Mbeki addressed the Springbok team after their victorious 2007 World Cup campaign in France he warned: We would be greatly mistaken if we took this immensely positive development as signifying that the rugby administrators, players and the nation have accomplished the shared goal of building rugby as a nonracial sport at all levels, on a sustainable basis.’1 In a leader column the Citizen also reported:


Reconciliation, transformation and reconstruction

Gigaba [Former Deputy Minister of Home Affairs] also hit out at the largely white composition of the Springbok rugby team saying winning the World Cup was not a justification for perpetuating racism in what is supposedly a national team.2


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The goals we set ourselves a decade ago have not fully been realised, despite the progress we have made. A non-racial society still has to be created. A non-sexist society still has to be created. We still have to eradicate poverty and fully address the needs of the most vulnerable in our society. To be true to ourselves as human beings demands that we act together to overcome the legacy of this common and terrible past. It demands that we do indeed enter into a people’s contract for a better tomorrow.3 Frustrated by inadequate attention being paid to providing equal sports opportunities for all, discussions began on how to tackle the thorny issues of development and levelling the playing fields. Many Blacks supported the idea of instituting quotas in sports teams, as they argued that this was the only way to give Blacks a chance to prove themselves. However, some Blacks felt that such support might compromise and demean the few Blacks who were already included in the national teams by being labeled ‘quota players’. At the same time, this suggestion prompted outrage from the white sector as it would undermine the previous privileges acquired by them through the process of reconciliation. Nonetheless, the annual South African Social Attitudes Survey of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) found that support for quotas has remained consistently high among Blacks and lowest among Whites: in late 2006, 63% of Blacks supported the proposal, compared to 14% of whites.4 Black sports officials were quite often embarrassed by there being little or no black representation in the national teams. Sports organisations were urged by the Sports Ministry to formulate transformation goals. However, neither sports organisations nor the government ever officially adopted the quota system. The idea of quota systems has been a troubled one more widely in sport. It is interesting to note that Joseph Blatter, President of the International Football Federation (FIFA), is now urging European football clubs to consider introducing the so-called 6–5 Plan, so as to widen the repertoire of players who will be available for the respective national teams. This issue was raised again by some English club managers when it was reported that several English major league football clubs have very few or hardly any UK nationals (never mind English players) in their teams. However, in this instance, no-one ever considered this matter a racial one. For some time there has been a general outcry that two of South Africa’s major team sports – cricket and rugby – were making little or no attempt to comply with agreed transformation goals. Finally, targets were set by


The government is fully aware that the task of levelling the playing fields in sport can be fully achieved only if it is manifested in all walks of life, as Thabo Mbeki has observed:


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the respective sports organisations to include a set number of black players in the squads, out of which the final team would be chosen. However, at times the selectors, for reasons known only to themselves, ignore these targets. The presidents of the affected sports are reluctantly then urged to intervene. Nonetheless, in nearly all instances, the interventions seem to be justified. There was an instance when a cricket squad to tour India was submitted for ratification to the president of Cricket South Africa, Advocate Norman Arendse who, using his constitutional veto, included the name of a black player, Charl Langeveldt, in preference to a white player, Andre Nel. There was ample justification for the inclusion of Langeveldt. Cedric Frolick, an ANC member of parliament, stated: ‘Whoever told Andre Nel that he was being dropped because of racial quotas should have his head read.’ He insisted that Langeveldt was an automatic choice ‘on merit’ because his reverse swing bowling was perfectly suited to the conditions in India.5 Nevertheless, the uproar continued unabated in the establishment media. Langeveldt felt so humiliated that he voluntarily withdrew from the team, saying that the public controversy over his selection upset him so much that he felt he would not be in the right frame of mind to do his best for the team.6 When black players are selected for South Africa’s cricket or rugby teams, a section of the population always suspects that the selection is based on racial grounds. When the black player Chester Williams was included in the team for the final of the Rugby World Cup in 1995 he stated that ‘the marketing men branded me a product of development and a sign of change. Nothing could have been more of a lie.’7 South Africa’s present rugby coach, Peter de Villiers, is black. This is the first time that a black person has been nominated to coach the national rugby side. There was general outcry that his nomination was because he was black and not because he was the best coach. Nonetheless, his record has indicated that he is as good as can be nominated. Under his leadership the team has dominated international rugby for the last two years. South Africa’s media, especially the written press, is made up overwhelmingly of white journalists. The prejudices, whether conscious or unconscious, of several of these journalists or sub-editors lead them to believe that any intervention by black sports officials is discrimination against whites. As a result, black administrators are constantly monitored. Black administrators urge team selectors to consider the inclusion of a black player in preference to a white when both are of comparable ability. At times, such inclusion is maliciously portrayed in the media, giving the impression that such a preference is exclusively on grounds of race with no consideration being given to ‘merit’. This view is supported by a large section of the white community. For example, several former Springbok captains who represented South Africa




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62 Sam Ramsamy

... beneficiaries and ambassadors of apartheid ... All of them have willingly wheeled and oiled the apartheid wagon. Their campaigns in New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere, especially in the 1981 tour of New Zealand, caused unforgettable pain and rupture in countries of the world. It prolonged our suffering and segregation. We regret this apparent rattling of the skeletons in the apartheid cupboard. Their gaunt eyes of injustice seem jaundiced in their interpretation of issues and in their selection of battlefield.8 A section of the white population, aided and abetted by the establishment media, does not hesitate to trot out the well-worn cliché of ‘Merit Selection’ to justify retaining their former privileges of exclusivity. Sometimes this group has no compunction in enumerating outdated race-stereotyped arguments. Even former Springbok coach, Nick Mallet, argues why whites, and especially the Afrikaner group/sector, dominate South Africa’s rugby teams: I don’t know why it is, but it is a fact that the Afrikaner cultural group just seems to produce some freakishly built people with a freakishly genetic make-up. There are very few countries in the world that can produce someone built like Pierre Spies, who is not only powerful and massively built, but also super-quick for his size. And he is not alone, there are other players just like him ... In the back line we also have several players with freakish genetic make-up ... It is not racist that these players play ahead of black players, just as it is not racist that players with Pacific Island backgrounds are starting to dominate backlines in New Zealand.9 Therefore, it is not unusual to read comments like: The great majority (of) South Africans hoped that the political changes of the nineties would pull South African sport out of its uneasy past. There is no replacement for international competition and that is what South Africans wanted after the long years in isolation.10


during the apartheid years forwarded a memorandum to the International Rugby Board, citing examples of political interference in South African rugby, as well as racially driven policies of the national federation. The Minister of Sport and Recreation described this group as:

Or Let us hope that Sarfu administrators now ‘see the wood for the trees’, and acknowledge their failure and progress very cautiously with their ‘transformation at any cost’ policies!11


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And

Social segregation Although all the apartheid race discriminatory laws have now been eliminated, social segregation still exists. The apartheid regime’s notorious racial segregation laws, especially the Group Areas Act, compelled the various races to live apart. And to a large extent the various race groups still live separately, so the race groups, in the main, interact among themselves. Discussions on issues of race at social gatherings continue along prejudicial lines. Discussions and debates on sports matters do not escape the legacies of apartheid, with a fair section of the white population still convinced that blacks are historically incapable of achieving acceptable high performances in many sports. Edward Griffiths, in his column in The Weekender, described this white syndrome when he said: However, with the new SA almost 14 years old, there remains an extraordinary number of white South Africans who are still oblivious to the reality of so many long-established, still underfunded black and coloured rugby and cricket clubs, and who still believe, deep down, in the privacy of their own homes, that ‘blacks don’t and can’t play rugby and cricket’.13

Everybody supports a winner The contradictions and ironies in the way South Africa sees its sport were adequately portrayed when former Deputy President of South Africa, Ms Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, addressed a prestigious sports gathering minced no words about sports achievements. She honestly stated that the only time that all members of parliament – ruling party and opposition – unashamedly hug one another is when a South African team or individual wins an international contest. This syndrome extends well beyond sport. The euphoria is identical when South Africans receive the Hollywood Academy Awards, Nobel Prizes or are placed in high international positions. Colour plays no part in this jubilation. When South Africa reached the 2007 Rugby World Cup Final in Paris, a journalist stated:


Let’s hope our administrators can leave the political agendas aside for a while.12

Now amid the euphoria of SA reclaiming the rugby World Cup, this hypocrisy is highlighted by members of the government queuing up


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Sam Ramsamy

feverishly to obtain Springbok jerseys, which they prevented all other sporting codes wearing for the last 13 years.14

The feel-good factor has brought passion, patriotism and a rare lowering of their guard by South African sportsmen, administrators and politicians. At the Union Buildings [South Africa’s Presidential Headquarters] in Pretoria on Friday, Springbok coach Jake White took issue with President Thabo Mbeki’s choice of blue tie with his Springbok blazer. White didn’t feel it looked right and so took off his green and gold tie and gave it to the President, taking Mbeki’s in the process. This moment of unity has created a unique opportunity for South African rugby – and all sports codes – to tackle the hard matters of transformation and development in a constructive way.15 Fred Khumalo, a black feature writer for the Johannesburg Sunday Times reiterated this oddity: I watched the Rugby World Cup at a friend’s place in the southern suburbs of the great city of Johannesburg. It was an instructive experience – not just watching the game itself, but watching those who were watching the game. There were about 14 of us, all black. The tension was palpable right from the word go. There we were, huddled around the screen, with our sweaty palms wrapped around cups and glasses of our favourite beverages. We sang along as the players broke into our national anthem. There were excited moments: ‘Hhawu, these white boys are actually singing our anthem!’ It was as if we were relieved that the white players had humbled themselves enough to learn the Nguni part of the anthem. Hallelujah, praise the lord for small miracles, we are finding each other at last, was the message I was getting from my fellow viewers. At the start of play, almost everyone in the room became a commentator. I was fascinated by these darkies becoming experts in what has hitherto been perceived as a white sport. ...


The editorial in the Sunday Times of Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest circulation newspaper, aptly summarised the syndrome after South Africa won the 2007 Rugby World Cup:

After the game, as Mrs K and I were driving home, we were captivated by the hordes of people who had poured onto the street, many of them holding torches and ululating around huge bonfires steeped in merriment. Almost 95% were black.16


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In the early stages of creating single non-racial structures within South African sport, two issues dominated discussions: development and international competition. The previously disadvantaged sector (non-racial in practice and operation) insisted that developmental needs had to be addressed, as that would eventually level the playing field and provide equal opportunities for all sectors of society. On the other hand, the previously enfranchised group (the privileged white group), who were starved of international competition, wanted re-entry into international sport. Both components seemed logical and reasonable. How to address both these aspirations simultaneously and satisfactorily became a serious challenge. The ANC believed that allowing international participation to resume so soon after the consolidation of the non-racial structures would be a magnanimous gesture and assist in the accelerating development, and more importantly, demonstrate to the white community the genuine overture of reconciliation. However, many sectors of the non-racial movement felt that resuming international participation before development had been addressed would, in effect, retain the status quo of exclusive or nearly exclusive white teams representing the country. Furthermore, the issue became complicated as widespread black participation only occurred in sports like football (soccer), boxing and athletics that needed only basic facilities. Most other sports, needing advanced facilities and previously only available to the enfranchised sector, are still practised chiefly by the white community. The South African media, dominated by the white sector, were once again having a field day reporting extensively on (white) South Africa’s participation in international sport. The corporate sector, again predominantly in the hands of whites, had no compunction in sponsoring elite sport. White athletes, acting as role models, inspired white participants. At the same time it must be pointed out that many of South Africa’s sports federations – both black and white – are making genuine efforts to redress the inequities of the past. Lack of financial and material support are currently making their task extremely difficult; they are hoping to receive the resources and goodwill of all South Africans to complete this daunting operation. South Africa’s Minister of Sport and Recreation, Rev Makhenkesi Stofile, in opening the South African Sports Indaba in Durban on 9 December 2008, summarised South Africa’s sports dilemma:


Whither South African sport

After almost fifteen years, it is proper that we stop and take stock of how far we have travelled towards our goal. Did unity assimilate some structures instead of uniting all? Is the envisaged development of the


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When that day is reached, no-one will revert to the argument of race. It will be a day when all South Africans will unhesitatingly support the country’s sports teams and individuals, whether the team is all white, all black or half white and half black.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 28 October 2007. The Citizen, Johannesburg, 29 October 2007. President Thabo Mbeki, Presentation to Parliament, 15 April 2003. Survey conducted by Struwig and Roberts for the HSRC and reported in the Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 4 November 2007. The Independent on Saturday, Johannesburg, 22 March 2008. Daily News, Durban, 20 March 2008. Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 29 September 2003. The Star, Johannesburg, 15 February 2008. Saturday Star, Johannesburg, 10 November 2007. Gert Kotze, a freelance journalist writing in the AIPS Magazine, July 2007 (Official Magazine of the International Sports Press Association, Castano Primo, Italy). Derek Krummech, writing in The Citizen, Johannesburg, 20 October 2007 (Commenting after South Africa’s victory in the Rugby World Cup). Garth Wright: writing in The Weekender, Johannesburg, 3–4 November 2007. The Weekender, Johannesburg, 10–11 November 2007. Sy Lerman in The Weekender, Johannesburg, 27–28 October 2007. Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 28 October 2007. Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 28 October 2007. Speech delivered by the South African Minister of Sport and Recreation in Durban on 10 October 2008.


underprivileged and forgotten a reality or a mirage? Those who allege that present structures and strategies only entrench privileges, are they agitating for reverse racism? How then do we all move to the South Africa of our dreams: a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic society? All South Africans aspire for this future. But how do we get all athletes to the starting blocks with equal chances?17


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5 Karl Spracklen and Jonathan Long

Introduction Arguably any moral project implies a set of standards. In the initiatives considered here, those standards have been highly formalised (some would say excessively bureaucratised) to try and establish a set of common expectations in promoting equality. As such they may be seen to take their lead from deontology (rather than the virtue ethical approach articulated by McNamee, 2008) which argues from the basis of ‘duties’: duties like preventing harm to others, safeguarding welfare, respect and ensuring equality. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) affirmed: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Such declarations are truly noble, but we have to work out how to give substance to them in practical terms. The charters and standards we address in this chapter are an attempt to do that in pursuit of equality in sport. What we want to consider here is their construction, their implementation and their consequences. In sporting terms, at least, these charters and standards appear to be largely a UK phenomenon, though they may be more widely disseminated through organisations like the Fundamental Rights Agency and Football Against Racism in Europe. We began this book with an observation about anti-racism being criticised from both left and right. Nonetheless we believe we have a responsibility to challenge the inequity represented by the large numbers of people from minority ethnic groups who experience racism. In this chapter, we will explore the use of charters and standards to promote anti-racism in British sport in the early years of this century, so that we can assess their success and determine whether these anti-racist policies have tackled (or


Using Charters and Standards to Promote Anti-Racism in Sport

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challenged) the problem of racism, or whether they have been problematic in their reification of racial difference. As well as being involved in research studies on racism in sport for a number of years, we have also been involved with charters and standards of the kind discussed here that attempt to promote anti-racism in sport. We feel it important to declare our position in relation to the standards we shall be discussing. Karl Spracklen worked for Sporting Equals – a joint initiative of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and Sport England (SE) – for four years as a National Development Manager for the Racial Equality Charter and Standard, and since then he has continued to act as an assessor and verifier on the Equality Standard; Jonathan Long serves on the accreditation panel for the Equality Standard (formerly Racial Equality Standard) for professional football clubs managed by Kick It Out.1

Sports policy and inclusion The history of equality and diversity in UK sport policy, process and practice over the last 30 years has been elucidated at length in the work of Green (2004a), Houlihan and White (2002), Hylton and Totten (2001) and Oakley and Green (2001), among others. All these authors have identified the emergence of sport as a public policy concern in the early 1970s, when central government intervention resulted in the establishment of the Sports Council. Like the Arts Council, the Sports Council had twin responsibilities for encouraging excellence and promoting participation,2 though Green (2004a: 368) insists that the original focus was on the latter. Since then, policy in the UK towards sport has fluctuated between increasing participation and improving performance, the emphasis being dependent on wider societal and political attitudes. The belief that sport has a moral or instrumental role in promoting equality and diversity was tempered by the realisation that sport largely failed to reflect the diversity of British society (Hylton and Totten, 2001) and the view that politicians and senior policy-makers favoured winning medals over any other aim (Houlihan and White, 2002). However, in 1997, with the election of the first centre-left Labour Government for eighteen years, it seemed that sport would be linked to a social inclusion agenda. Certainly, the rhetoric of Labour’s policies on sport in the late 1990s suggested that social inclusion, equality and diversity were seen as central to sports policy (Hylton and Totten, 2001: 47). However, it should also be noted, as Green (2004a) argues, that Labour’s policies, while strong on the rhetoric of diversity, have served to entrench the importance of elite performance in the structures and cultures of British sport. The rhetoric of inclusion, however, was embraced by policy-makers in UK Sport and Sport England, direct descendents of the original Sports Council, and led to attempts to embed sports equity in funding arrangements


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(Hylton and Totten, 2001: 59). A lead had been given by football supporters and individuals within the football governing bodies. At a local level, organisations like Leeds United Fans Against Racism and Fascism (Thomas, Chapter 12 of this volume), Foxes Against Racism and Football Unites Racism Divides started to take matters of racial equality seriously, and the more widely based Kick It Out and Show Racism the Red Card anti-racism campaigns were launched. In 1993 Kick It Out issued a ‘ten point plan’ of measures professional football clubs should follow to challenge racism, followed in 1995 (after research undertaken by us and our colleagues into the nature and extent of racism in the sport – Long et al., 1995) by the Rugby Football League’s 13-point Tackle It Action Plan (later revised to a six-point system).3 In 1998, Sport England’s Racial Advisory Group recommended the establishment of a sports equity organisation to promote racial equality in sport, and the UK Commission for Racial Equality set up Sporting Equals in partnership with Sport England (Spracklen, 2003). This organisation worked through the Commission for Racial Equality to lobby policy-makers and senior managers in sport to encourage them to develop anti-racism campaigns and positive action to promote racial equality both in and through their sports. This matched the rhetoric from central government, which, through documents such as A Sporting Future for All (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2000), stressed the need to develop policies and strategies to manage and encourage diversity in British sport (Houlihan and White, 2002; Spracklen, 2003). Further, the emergence of a social inclusion discourse contributed to a crowded space in relation to equality and diversity. While Sport England and UK Sport were establishing a policy-led sports equity approach to managing and developing diversity in sport, the Commission for Racial Equality was developing a standards approach to monitoring and evaluating organisational capacity and commitment to racial equality. This standard was primarily aimed at the public sector, but was applied indirectly to British sport, because local government is central to most grassroots sports development in the UK. Despite research questioning the extent to which the local government equality standard had actually been implanted (Speeden and Clarke, 2000), for Sporting Equals it seemed a logical move to re-write the CRE’s standards and apply them directly to governing bodies of sport and other national sports organisations. However, this move meant that organisations in the third or voluntary sector were put through an assessment designed for organisations in the public sector. With the backing of Sport England, Sporting Equals launched Achieving Racial Equality: a Standard for Sport in 2000. Crucially, evidence of achievement against the objectives of this standard (the ‘Racial Equality Standard’) was later linked by Sport England to continued funding of governing bodies, which led to every governing body funded by Sport England, bar one, achieving the Preliminary Level of the Racial Equality Standard


Using Charters and Standards to Promote Anti-Racism


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by the end of March 2003 (Spracklen, 2003).4 The original Sporting Equals Standard was then re-written to be applicable to two other types of organisations involved in the delivery and development of sport: one for local authorities, in conjunction with the Local Government Association (called Achieving Racial Equality Through Sport, not ‘in sport’, a reflection of the Government’s view of local authority sport as a vehicle for anti-racism initiatives) and one for Active Sports Partnerships set up by Sport England to co-ordinate sports participation at a county level. Sporting Equals commissioned Leeds Metropolitan University to undertake a study of the impact of the Racial Equality Standard on the policies, structures and cultures of national sports organisations. This study (Long et al., 2003) is discussed in more detail below. It suggested, however, that the impact of the Racial Equality Standard had been partial, and commitment to racial equality did not in practice permeate down the structures of organisations. Moreover, the work done to achieve Preliminary Level of the Racial Equality Standard by those organisations did not tackle resistance to equality and diversity in their respective cultures. Nevertheless, the principle of the Racial Equality Standard was welcomed and recognised by sports organisations (Long et al., 2003). At the same time, Kick It Out adapted the concept of the Standard to create a Racial Equality Standard of its own, in partnership with the governing bodies of association football, to be used in assessing the work of professional football clubs in the English Premier League (though also available for use in the lower-tier Football League). In time both these standards came to reflect a move in the UK from ‘single interest’ groups to more generic consideration of equality matters. The Commission for Racial Equality has been subsumed within the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the two standards now also address disability, gender, sexual orientation, age and religious affiliation.

The idea As is clear from the introduction to this book, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, sport was one arena where overt racism was obvious: in the case of football, for example, with a high profile media presence whenever racial abuse occurred on the terraces or on the pitch. That racism was and, it could be argued, still is associated with competition, partisanship and nationalism. That racism led initially to denial (‘we let anybody play our sport’), then outrage, then claims that such racism was associated with a small far-right, racist element (typically seen as hooligans in football, or older, working-class traditionalists in rugby league). The idea behind the Standards is not to accept a shrug of the shoulders that displaces responsibility to bad individuals expected to cure themselves. Instead, the Standards require organisations to acknowledge they have a role to play in establishing mechanisms that will ensure more equitable outcomes, and not just argue


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that it is society’s responsibility to correct its miscreants. They necessitate a review of the organisation’s own practices. And they challenge the deniers (‘There is no racism in the game’) and the displacers (‘It’s somewhere else’) by asking questions about what is being done and where the people from minority ethnic groups are in their sport. Following a deontological position, these reflect responsibilities independent of any that might follow from atoning for sport’s role in colonial subjugation (for example, Giulianotti, 2006). The anti-racism policy response we are interested in here has seen an attempt to go beyond the blaming of a minority hooligan element. Typically it involves a charter of principles of racial equality that clubs/ organisations are invited to sign up to and demonstrate their commitment. That commitment involves addressing tiers of action (most commonly (foundation) preliminary to advanced) required in a Standard such as that produced by Sporting Equals. The practical interventions that they represent might be seen as an attempt to avoid ‘the danger that sports governing bodies will hide behind the rhetoric of “human rights”, “peace” and “development”, rather than prioritise these missions in hard cash’ (Giulianotti, 2006: 67). The intention is that this should represent a developmental process, but some seem to have thought the Preliminary level was a satisfactory end point. These Standards have been designed to measure achievement against management-focussed objectives at their initial levels (the equality of opportunity identified by Bagilhole, 1997), with a focus on equality of outcome at their higher levels. What this meant for the initial success of the Racial Equality Standard was a rapid and calculated move by sports managers and policy-makers to embed the objectives of its Preliminary Level in their policies and plans (but not necessarily their practices). If this did not happen, they knew their sports would lose funding. Even though this process hardly started to deal with difficult questions about managing and promoting equality and diversity, it was seen by some in sports management as an imposition by the Government, through Sport England, of a performance management framework of audit and inspection that was resented (see Green, 2004b, for a similar assessment of elite sport policy). That is, people within English sport believed in the autonomy of their particular sports, and believed the specifics of their histories could be understood in terms of resistance to bureaucracy and officialdom. Essentially, governing bodies of sport in England, and the UK generally, are bodies that provide mutual aid and support to their members. This is their historical purpose and, despite pressures to professionalise (Green, 2004b), most of the governing bodies remain reliant on volunteers who get involved in governance because they care about their sport. This, of course, is intriguingly suggestive of white, middle-class myths of Englishness, liberty and freedom from state interference (Easthope, 1998). The more




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outcome-oriented objectives of the higher levels of the Racial Equality Standard (increasing participation rates) were never linked by Sport England to funding, and three years after the initial impact study (Long et al., 2003), it was clear that little work had been done to get sports to a position where they could achieve the levels that would allow them to enter into a process of change to make them more diverse and equitable (Spracklen et al., 2006). That said, the idea behind the Standards is to give sports organisations a set of tasks and targets that take them through incremental steps to a point where they have become equitable and anti-racist. When the Standards were created in the early 2000s, it was recognised that many sports organisations did not ‘speak the language’ of equality and diversity and found it difficult to appreciate what was required. All the Standards in British sport were designed to be part of a wider developmental relationship between sports organisations and the sponsoring organisation of the appropriate Standard. The sponsoring organisation works with the sports bodies to support them in formulating their policies, action plans and equality schemes and demonstrating how their actions address the requirements of the Standard. So, for example, for the Equality Standard for Sport the role of an independent Assessor was established not only to make an initial written assessment of their work, but also to work with them to help establish how much progress they had made towards the targets of the Standard. Support, then, is built into the development and practice of the Standards to help sports organisations build capacity around anti-racism (and other equality issues). But each Standard framework assumes that sports organisations will ultimately become independent of such support: the litmus test of the rigour of anti-racist policies and plans is ownership of their implementation and development. Along with formal support, there is professional, independent assessment or accreditation. With the Racial Equality Charter for Sport run by Sporting Equals, any organisation could choose to sign up to its principles and commitments, but there was no way to control who did and who did not. Sporting Equals created a formal Assessment Panel for the Standard to review portfolios of evidence provided by organisations seeking to be awarded one of the Standard’s levels of accreditation. The other Standards established similar panels to assess compliance with the Equality Standard, later creating a two-stage procedure of independent assessment and verification. This process is adequate when attempting to assess an organisation at a particular point in time, but there remains unanswered the trickier question of how to monitor compliance beyond the formal award. There is no national organisation of community groups that could fulfil that role, and at the local level the network of Race Equality Councils is patchy and is more likely to give priority to employment, housing or policing rather than sport.


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It is significant that Sporting Equals was a joint initiative by the Commission for Racial Equality and Sport England. Research on racism in sport (for example, Long et al., 1995; McDonald and Ugra, 1998) and the lack of race equality across sport indicated a real need for strategic action. The aim of the project was to develop policies and practices which promoted racial equality through working with the governing bodies of various sports and key national sports organisations. The Commission for Racial Equality had previously funded research and campaigns around racism in sport, notably Kick It Out (an anti-racism campaign in football) and Tackle It (research and racial equality campaigning in rugby league). Sport England had a long history of promoting equality in sport since the conception of Sport for All, but the impact of this work had been varied (cf. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2000). Prior to the creation of Sporting Equals it was clear that progress on racial equality had not been as quick as the progress made on gender and disability equality. With three equity organisations (Women’s Sports Foundation, English Federation for Disability Sport and later, Sporting Equals), the British sports councils were able to promote a more strategic sports equity framework (Spracklen, 2003). This was partly a response to wider equality policies pursued by the Labour Government, and partly a response to national governing bodies of sport that struggled to fit anti-racism into existing policies that supported sports opportunities for women and girls and people with disabilities. For (a few) other national governing bodies, the sports equity framework was crucial to reassure them that their work with black and minority ethnic (BME) communities was consistent with a philosophy of inclusion and anti-racism. Developing the Charter and the Racial Equality Standard (and other work of Sporting Equals) was recognition that sports organisations might be different from large scale public sector and commercial employers. Together these made demands for success that were sufficiently flexible but necessarily relevant. But how can mutual aid organisations (sports clubs and governing bodies) or commercial companies (professional clubs) be persuaded to meet these demands? When Sporting Equals and Sport England launched the Racial Equality Charter for Sport, a pilot was established which saw six sports and the National Coaching Foundation (now sportscoachUK) working to achieve the Preliminary Level of the Racial Equality Standard. In December 2000 four sports – basketball, cricket, rugby league and rugby union, plus the National Coaching Foundation – achieved the Preliminary Level. By June 2002 they had been joined by badminton, gymnastics, hockey, lawn tennis, netball, the Institute of Sport and Recreation Management and Sportsmatch. The pace of progress was slow, and no sport had reached the Intermediate Level by that date. Sports organisations had not yet fully engaged with the


Building interest within sport


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Sport England expects all sports organisations to put policies, procedures and plans in place to tackle racism and promote racial equality. Those sports that do not meet the Preliminary Level of the Standard in the future will have their funding reviewed. This commitment was repeated on a number of occasions, and was then written into the conditions of the Exchequer grants that governing bodies received from Sport England. All governing bodies had to achieve Preliminary Level of the Standard by March 2003 (Carpenter, 2002). Despite this firm line from Sport England, there was no indication when sports needed to achieve the Intermediate and Advanced Levels of the Standard, where the work on anti-racism and racial equality was expected to make a significant difference. If moral and ethical commitments to tackling racism fail, sponsors of the Standards have been happy to appeal to the commercial interests of clubs and other sports organisations, suggesting to them that anti-racism and equality is not a drain on finances but a crucial contributor to sustainability through the prospect of more participants and spectators. That equates to more retail sales, good public relations, more sponsors, and allows organisations to demonstrate they are contributing to Government social objectives when positioning themselves for funding bids.

More than ticking boxes? There needs to be some agreed mechanism to gauge progress, even if for some organisations the Standards might be seen as a tick-box exercise. Before the Standards some sports were good, some were bad. Now, with the Standards, there is a road map to help those who want to take equality seriously. All the Standards are evidence-based: this is crucial to demonstrate progress rather than merely talk a good talk. The Standards provide a management framework to help organisations take little steps to sustain the work rather than focussing on public relations or development. For all the weaknesses of the Standards approach, we believe it is a necessary first step to normalising anti-racism in sports organisations, and some benefits can be identified: ● ●

●


work of Sporting Equals and the Standard, but Sport England was determined to see the governing bodies it funded achieve the Preliminary Level. In March 2002, Trevor Brooking (2002: 1), Chair of Sport England, said:

raised awareness of racial equality a series of prompts for sports organisations to take equality issues seriously a set of practical steps to improving practice


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●

● ●

the inclusion of racial equality in general policy statements greater commitment to the idea of equality (though sometimes limited to a few people) some linking with Black and minority ethnic communities a rallying point and raison d’être for racial equality activists to push forward issues in their organisations.

The Standards, then, support and promote progression through a measured approach. The initial focus in the Standards is therefore on getting the basics right, getting commitment and getting the corporate centre on board before moving out to increasing participation and involvement. The Standards begin with the abstract, such as the principles articulated in racial equality or equity policies, which may draw on a number of philosophical positions on equality (Bagilhole, 1997), but they move quickly to implementing good practice. It is in the levels beyond Foundation/Preliminary where there is mixed success. It has proven simple for organisations to achieve those first levels, but it is much harder to get the right stuff done at other levels. For the Sporting Equals Racial Equality Standard, 96% of the national governing bodies of sport in England (including UK-wide governing bodies) achieved the Preliminary Level, but only 1% achieved Intermediate Level before this Standard was replaced by the Equality Standard in 2004.

Changing cultures The struggle to achieve higher levels of the Standards is related to the difficulty of changing the culture of sports organisations. To meet the higher levels of the Standards, equality and an anti-racist ethic need to be integral to the way a sport or a sports club operates (not just left to one champion, but evident throughout). It is not just about signing things and committing to things, but about achieving things. These higher levels demand that organisations can demonstrate they are moving beyond tokenism to a confidence in embracing difference and diversity as core elements of the organisation. This means tackling the culture of these particular sports and organisations. Rugby league, for example, is a white, working-class, northern male game (Spracklen, 2001, 2007). In its attempts to embrace racial equality and anti-racism (and meet the higher levels of the Equality Standard) it is having to come to terms with the strength of its community identity/culture and the problems that identity has created (Spracklen et al., 2009). It is the problem of belonging and exclusion, of Us versus Them, and of who gets to be Us. What these excursions into policy research and critical race theorising show is that interventions to promote racial equality in sport are ultimately dependent on the cultural and social contexts of sport. Any evaluation of work such as the equality standards in the UK needs, then, to be informed


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by an awareness of the specific and contested racialisation of British sport (Back et al., 2001; Carrington and McDonald, 2001a). This racialisation is as much about embedding and (re)presenting ideas of hegemonic whiteness (Dyer, 1997; Gabriel, 1998; Gilborn, 2005) as it is about normalising racialised Others (Denzin, 2002; Woodward, 2004; Douglas, 2005; Fusco, 2005). Talking about the value of diversity is not the same as having diversity. For as Hage (1998: 139) argues, in relation to liberal responses to multiculturalism, ‘it is in the opposition between valuing diversity and being diverse that [whiteness] reproduces itself’.

Responsibilities, collaborations and resources From one perspective it can be argued that the Standards provide sports organisations with a route to demonstrating their compliance with the Human Rights Act 1998 and various Equality Acts, especially, for racial equality, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. This Act sets out general and specific duties for the public sector in the UK, which includes organisations such as the sports councils and local authorities. But beyond that, we argue, there is a clear moral duty to be fair and to be anti-racist. The sports councils all have policies that make the vague moral case for fairness (equity, equality and diversity), but it is necessary to look beyond them to organisations like Kick It Out and Football Unites Racism Divides for an explicitly political line on anti-racism. The standards show that many sport organisations have named individuals responsible for equality and diversity. Sometimes organisations work effectively through having a senior officer leading the equality work, but there is a danger that such an officer is seen as the ‘equality person’, allowing other senior staff to forget the challenge. There is also the problem of overwork and burn-out, which often results in such staff leaving their job and the organisation’s equality work being held up until a new equality officer is appointed. A designated champion is important to make sure the responsibility for equality is not forgotten, but it is the mark of failure if everything is left to that one person operating in isolation. Unless it is a shared project, it is difficult to see how the organisation could ever move beyond the Foundation/Preliminary level. For the work to be effective, there needs to be leadership from the top, formal partnerships with other organisations that are meaningful, ethical and sustainable in terms of resource, and real community links – often sports organisations see community development as a means of raising their profile or recruiting players, not as a means of engaging with hard-to-reach groups and promoting cohesion and inclusion. Resources, of course, are important, both in the sports and in the organisations sponsoring the Standards. Sports organisations expect much from


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the organisation promoting a Standard – Sporting Equals, Kick It Out, the sports councils – but those organisations, similarly, do not have unlimited resources. At the time it was promoting the Racial Equality Standard, Sporting Equals employed only two full-time members of staff to support over a hundred national governing bodies working through the Standard’s various levels. For the Standards to work, the sponsoring organisations need to fund the support mechanisms and the assessment processes adequately. On the other side of the resources coin, national governing bodies and other sports organisations have a range of objectives, and against those competing demands addressing racism may not command priority. It is especially difficult to ‘mainstream’ equality if there are few staff employed by the organisation. Equality does not come cheap: organisations have to put money into achieving it. They have to commit to long-term, sustainable activity. That said, there are good examples of small sports organisations that have embraced equality despite their lack of resource (for example, the National Rounders Association or Blackpool Football Club). What these have shown is that organisations with small resources can deliver positive outcomes, as long as there is real commitment at senior level.

New directions As a result of earlier research we recognised some resistance to the Standard and concluded (Long et al., 2005: 55): Not all subscribe to the need to combat racism and promote racial equality; some who do are not persuaded that the Standard is the best way to achieve this; and among those who are, many feel that other problems should be addressed first. That observation is still justified today. Some of the nervousness associated with the word ‘racism’ may be removed by the transition to a generic equality standard. However, in the UK there has been considerable suspicion among race equality campaigners, gender equality campaigners and disability equality campaigners alike of the move to addressing equality generically. This suspicion arose not from a philosophical standpoint, but a political one, each group concerned that their interests would be diluted rather than consolidated. If sports clubs and organisations find it difficult to grasp the complexity of racial equality issues, the scope for confusion (and perhaps, cynically, evasion) is greater with this expanded challenge even though the equality standards are direct descendents of the racial equality standards. At that level, the case surrounding the two Standards we have been discussing here is similar, but there are other differences. In football, some clubs found it difficult to appreciate their




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responsibilities with regard to racial equality because they saw few people from minority ethnic groups in their area. It is harder to argue that matters relating to women and people with disabilities apply any less to one club than another, so the case for equality should be easier to make. In the wider world of the National Governing Bodies and other national sports organisations, the interest groups representing women and disabled people (principally the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation and the English Federation of Disability Sport) are better established and better resourced than Sporting Equals, which has been struggling to compete in this bigger pool. The response of policy-makers developing the Equality Standard has been to recognise this problem of limitation of intervention, through increased support resources. The Equality Standard Advisor, for example, plays the role of a consultant, working closely with NGBs to help them identify evidence and develop action. But it is not clear that a consensus has emerged in the policy arena about how the new Equality Standard is to be enforced: whether, that is, national sports organisations would be expected to show progress against the Equality Standard’s objectives in order to retain or be awarded funding from UK Sport and the four home country sports councils. In that sense, the problem of intervention has been dealt with by avoiding the question, and it is no surprise that people involved in the delivery of sport have little knowledge of the new Equality Standard or its potential impact on the management of their sports. Following Horne (1995) and Bagilhole (1997), if the Racial Equality Standard coerced sports managers into a purely reactive engagement with equality and diversity, the new Equality Standard may well end up as no more than a gesture unless there is a clear framework in place that balances intervention, encouragement and support. What this overview, and our long engagement with the charter and standards shows, is that there is a lack of problematisation when it comes to managing and promoting equality and diversity. Following Bagilhole (1997) and others who have identified contested (liberal and radical) understandings of equality in policy and process, it becomes clear that attitudes to managing and promoting equality and diversity in sport are confused. How far sport in the UK is willing or able to reach equality of outcome is debatable. Even when racism is acknowledged, it is usually only insofar as it can be seen elsewhere. All the people interviewed in Spracklen et al., (2006) agreed that equality and diversity were good things, but understanding what that meant and how it applied to their sport was absent from the predominant performance management discourse of auditing achieved objectives against the standards (cf. Power, 1997; Rose, 1999). For example, the sport of rugby league has publicly backed equality and diversity initiatives, and there is some evidence that the game is increasing in popularity


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amongst black men in London (Spracklen, 2007). But the game is still one that is, structurally and culturally, maintained by and for predominantly white, working-class, northern English communities (Spracklen, 2001), communities that also embody and reproduce hegemonic masculinity (Spracklen, 1996, 2001). By being responsive to the need to challenge the embedded and normalised white hegemony outlined by critical race theorists (Hylton, 2005, 2009), we can begin to understand this failure amongst policy-makers and sports in the UK to problematise equality and diversity. The failure is built into the discourse of the Equality Standard, which demands evidence of action but not evidence of change. It positions itself as a framework to help British sport work with ‘them’, that is, groups defined in opposition to the mainstream of sport. It can be seen that despite challenges and contestations of power typified by anti-racist campaigns like Kick It Out (Back et al., 2001), the cultures of English and British sports are themselves often part of a racial hegemony. Real issues around under-representation and lack of involvement in the sites of power (the decision-making committees, the professional development and management teams) are presented as norms through stereotyping of ‘racial’ qualities and ‘cultural’ differences and appeals to historical circumstances and traditions (Spracklen, 1996; Carrington and McDonald, 2001b) in what has been identified elsewhere as new racism (for example, Barker, 1981). Apart from the deliberate obstruction of racists, much of the effort of promoting racial equality is hampered by a lack of understanding in sport of the dominance of ‘whiteness’ (Long and Hylton, 2002) and the consequent marginalisation of black experience. As we have argued previously, this dominance of ‘whiteness’ is to be found in its taken-for-granted representation as the human norm (Dyer, 1997), or what Maynard (1994, p. 20) refers to as the ‘everydayness of White privilege’. Spracklen (2003: 44) has suggested: sport expresses a sense of community and belonging associated with the people who control the myth-making apparatus. In England, this means that sport plays a crucial formative role in the creation of middle-class, white, male myths. It is these ‘myths’ that then set the norm and serve to exclude. The concern expressed by some respondents (Spracklen et al., 2006) that the new Equality Standard would somehow work against or limit race equality is partly cynicism about top-down management, but partly too an expression of deep-rooted unease with the whiteness of sport in the UK. That stems from an unease amongst champions of racial equality in various sports who feel that the new Equality Standard is, through agency or




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complacency, bolstering hegemonic whiteness (Long and Hylton, 2002), helping it meet the challenge of various anti-racism campaigns and rein-in work that had started to question the taken-for-granted (Maynard, 1994). Although many policy-makers welcomed the new generic approach, since the announcement that the new Equality Standard was to replace the Racial Equality Standard, little work on racial equality has taken place in English sport, and our research indicates that some of the concerns are justified by evidence of inaction. Crucially, the status of diversity in the policy frameworks of British sport is not matched by an equivalent status in the way in which sport is managed and delivered, where standards are seen at best as supporting and justifying work already being done, but at worst as an unwarranted interference in ‘the way things have always been done’ (cf. Long et al., 1995; Welch et al., 2004).

Conclusion There are four key challenges faced by sports policy-makers and antiracism campaigners. First, how can we enforce compliance when it is typically mutual aid member organisations or commercial enterprises that are involved? Schneider-Ross (2003) found that despite the legal duty to promote race equality under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, public bodies (local authorities and Government departments, for example) had made only slow progress. Second, there is the challenge of the shifting demographic of the United Kingdom with a growing proportion of people from minority ethnic groups, particularly in the younger groups more likely to participate in sport, though many of these come from Asian backgrounds with previously low levels of participation in sport. Alongside these there is also a large number of newer migrants, particularly from the former communist bloc of eastern Europe, who may be less likely to be picked out on the street (or in observational research), but may be less likely to speak English than those from former colonies. Third, there is the recognition that other equity groups have faced a similar set of problems in engaging with sport. With the new Equality Standards taking into account issues relating to gender, disability, sexuality, age and religion, there has been a strong argument from anti-racists that this is at the expense of the political stance against racism. The same issue appeared with the creation of the country’s Equality and Human Rights Commission – individual equality groups were concerned that their issues would get overlooked in this more generic exercise. The third challenge, then, is to successfully integrate these different equality issues while maintaining and recognising the specific support networks. Finally, the most important challenge has to be to make equality procedures part of the fabric of the organisation, not just something left to a peripheral group that continually has to fight for funding.


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Table 5.1 Evidence criteria: Preliminary level Objective

Evidence

Make a clear public commitment to achieve racial equality

Copy of signed Charter, information about the signing, photographs of the signing, news release and subsequent articles/web site/ publicity.

Develop a written statement or policy on racial equality which reflects the aims and objectives of the organisation

Copy of agreed equity statement and/or equity policy or racial equality policy.

Develop racial equality action plans or objectives within existing strategies and set appropriate racial equality targets

Copy of equity action plan – plan must have appropriate targets.

Ensure that all communities are aware of your commitment to racial equality

News release on Charter signing and distribution list as a minimum, plus any articles/ publicity. Any extra publicity efforts about work on racial equality, for example policy/initiatives is encouraged but not mandatory.

Participation and Public Image Collect information about the age, sex, disability and ethnic origin of people who take part in your sport

You should supply the data and the forms/letters you used plus an explanation of how and why it was collected

Analyse the data and calculate participation rates, by age, sex, disability and ethnic origin, in order to obtain a profile of your organisation

A report (no more than a few paragraphs) or part of a longer report such as the annual report, which analyses participation trends between different ethnic minority communities, different genders, ages, areas of your sport and against the national demographic. Also include some explanation of methodology and relate the analysis to your equity targets and their review – make recommendations for future action!

Develop a complaints and disciplinary procedure, with either a nominated officer or sub-committee taking lead responsibility

Copy of your complaints procedure, disciplinary procedure with appropriate references to your equity policy and issues of racial, sexual and other discrimination and harassment. If your procedures don’t have those references you need to supply some draft amendments you intend to add to the procedures. You need to explain how the procedures relate to each other and how the procedures are publicised.


Commitment, Policy and Planning

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82 Karl Spracklen and Jonathan Long

Objective

Evidence

Collect positive images of racial equality in your sport, and in your organisation, as well as examples of good racial equality practice

Leaflets/posters/photos in newsletters/websites that use positive imagery. A minimum of two examples. Plus any picture library and information on any good racial equality practice – initiatives on the ground (only mandatory if you are a large sport).

Administration and Management Obtain approval for the racial equality action plan from the management committee

Minute clearly stating the equity action plan was approved by the board or equivalent.

Collect information about the age, sex, disability and ethnic origin of people involved in management, coaching, administration and service delivery in your organisation

You need to provide data for coaches, or a sample of, for example, national coaches. In addition, you need to undertake an internal audit of staff (paid employees), the Board and other key committees.

Assess the racial equality training needs of all staff involved in the development, delivery and management of your organisation

You need to submit a report that identifies what training you plan to give or has been given to coaches, paid staff and key volunteers. You need to identify priorities, include timescales and identify funding or gaps in funding. Where training has already been delivered you should include details of that training – who attended, when the training took place, and what was delivered.

Source: From submission guidance notes supplied by Sporting Equals, 2003.

Notes 1. Details of the current versions of these standards can be found at: http://www. equalitystandard.org/, http://www.kickitout.org/829.php 2. Originally ‘for the encouragement and development of sport, for the welfare of the population at large and for the attainment of high standards of performance’. 3. Revised to reflect the tackle count in rugby league from zero (tolerance) to six (truly inclusive, uncompromising, family game). ‘Thirteen’ in the original Tackle It referred to the number of on-field players in a rugby league team, which is one way league differs from the fifteen-player game of rugby union. 4. Information on the requirements of the Preliminary Level of the Racial Equality Standard is presented in Table 5.1.


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‘What I Said was Racist – But I’m Not a Racist’: Anti-Racism and the White Sports/Media Complex Ben Carrington

Introduction On 20 April 2004 AS Monaco beat Chelsea Football Club 3–1 in the semi-final of the European Champions League. Despite having a player sent off early in the second half, the French team managed to defeat the starstudded and vastly wealthier Chelsea, managed at the time by the Italian coach Claudio Ranieri. Marcel Desailly, Chelsea’s black French defender, had played poorly that night, although, as the result indicated, few of his teammates had acquitted themselves well. The widely respected football pundit and former manager Ron Atkinson, more affectionately known within the game as ‘Big Ron’, was commentating on the match for the television channel ITV. During the broadcast’s commercial break, while watching a replay of an earlier incident involving Desailly, Atkinson turned to Clive Tyldesley, his co-commentator, and said, ‘He is what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy, thick nigger’ (Kelso 2004: 13). Unfortunately for Atkinson, and though missed by the UK audience at the time, what he thought was a private, off-air remark was inadvertently broadcast across the Middle East region where his studio microphone remained ‘live’. Within 24 hours of his comments becoming known Atkinson had resigned from his broadcast commentator duties and lost his weekly newspaper column in the Guardian. In the following days and weeks a discussion took place within the British media concerning whether or not Atkinson himself was a racist with numerous players, current and former, coming forward to defend the man, if not his words. Somewhat ironically, given his comments, Atkinson is widely credited with helping to break football’s racial barriers that up until the 1960s and 1970s prevented black footballers from entering into the ‘national game’ in any significant numbers. Atkinson is remembered, in part, as the manager of West Bromwich Albion who in 1978 signed Brendon Batson, joining Cyril Regis and Laurie Cunningham. The players


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collectively became known as the ‘Three Degrees’, thus heralding the ‘black revolution’ within professional football in England (Back et al., 2001). Given his ‘anti-racist’ credentials, or so the argument went, how could Big Ron possibly be racist? Where had such comments come from? Could someone make a racist statement and not be a racist? To what extent was intent important if the effect was a form of racist hate speech? If Big Ron was racist, then what did that say about the rest of English football and by extension English, and perhaps British, society? What, in this moment, even constituted racism? This particular ‘race row’, as the British tabloids often like to call such events, vividly highlights some of the broader themes that this chapter addresses, namely, the shifting and contradictory nature of contemporary racism, the complex relationship between ideologies of race, sport and the media, and the necessity of developing more sophisticated ways of thinking about how racism in sport might be challenged. It is suggested that we lack adequate forms of anti-racist discourse and praxis that are able to comprehend fully and therefore confront the complexities of twenty-first century racisms. This chapter provides a brief account of the ‘sports/media complex’ before discussing examples from both the USA and Britain where recent ‘racist incidents’, often linked to sport, have become public issues. The chapter argues that there have in fact been a number of important and effective anti-racist interventions in sport, particularly over the past two decades, that should be recognised, yet the future politics of sports anti-racism remains unclear. The chapter concludes by addressing the nature of anti-racist interventions in the context of a widespread belief in the non-existence of racism as a structural feature of contemporary western societies and the failure of antiracist politics to think beyond the boundaries of race.

Race, ideology and the sports/media complex In his short but influential 1984 essay entitled ‘The Spectacle of Accumulation: Material and Cultural Factors in the Evolution of the Sports/ Media Complex’, Jhally traced what he termed the ‘material and cultural contexts within which the sports/media complex has developed’ (1984: 42). Jhally’s analysis was an attempt to go beyond orthodox Marxist accounts that simply viewed professional sports as cultural transmitters of ruling class ideology that served both to quell working-class political consciousness and to bind the proletariat to the interests of capital through the mass spectacle of sport. Rather, Jhally argued, sport (and professional sport in particular) needed to be theorised in relation to broader media structures as the two institutions – sport and the media – are increasingly inter-connected, sport’s ‘internal organisations’ becoming ‘fundamentally altered by their relations with the media’ (1984: 42). Developing a ‘materialist’ analysis of the mass media, Jhally argued that advertising is central to how the capitalist media


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is able to create both use- and exchange-value. What advertisers seek, of course, is an audience – the audience commodity – thus we can understand, in large part, the relationship between sport and the media as driven, over time, by ‘the sale of mass audiences to advertisers’ (1984: 43, emphasis in the original) and the related selling of technology (radios, televisions, satellite and cable receivers, and so on) to that same audience as desirable new consumer products.1 Jhally’s insightful neo-Marxist approach to thinking through the sports/ media relationship via questions of audience and ideology has been subject to some refinement and development over the years (see Jhally, 1989; Jhally, 2006). In particular, sports sociologists, media studies theorists, and communications scholars have called attention to the need to differentiate more carefully between specific media forms such as the print media (local, regional and national) and broadcast media, including both radio and television, that, while sharing similar logics, also operate by and according to quite distinct patterns of production, organisation and distribution. With the current expansion of wireless forms of mobile technology and communication and the interactive possibilities of new ‘virtual’ media platforms and user-generated content, how sports are both produced and consumed has changed even more rapidly since the early 1980s (Boyle and Haynes, 2000; Leonard, 2009). Similarly, others have attempted to locate the sports/media complex within a broader cultural context (something Jhally’s earlier analysis alluded to but did not fully develop) where both the inherently polyvocal nature of the sports text and the multiple (and increasingly often engaged and ‘active’) audiences are given more weight within the analysis (see Wenner, 1989, 1998; Whannel, 1992; Rowe, 1999). For example, David Rowe (1999) has reworked Jhally’s original formulation to talk in broader terms of the ‘media sports cultural complex’ in order to more clearly signify ‘both the primacy of symbols in contemporary sport and the two-way relationship between the sports media and the great cultural formation of which it is part’ (1999: 4; see also Whannel, 2009 and Rowe, 2011).2 Although a discussion of ‘race’ per se does not figure within Jhally’s earlier essay, I want to draw out some of the implications by thinking through the ways in which the sports/media complex has increasingly become a powerful site for the articulation of deeply racialised beliefs concerning human difference in the selling of racialised and commodified sporting bodies to mass audiences. The ‘spectacle of the Other’ (Hall, 1997b) that the sports/ media complex produces serves to both confirm and challenge ideas concerning racial equality and the supposedly meritocratic nature of western societies. Sports, therefore, are an important cultural barometer for gauging popular shifts regarding the changing meaning of race and we tend, more often than not, to experience sport not directly as active participants but as audiences and spectators, often through highly mediated forms. We might


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think of the sports/media complex, then, as having an important role – a role arguably more powerful than any other social institution – in the ideological transmission of ideas about race: the sports/media complex becomes the modality through which popular ideas about race are lived. Ideology is understood here not simply as the imposition of false beliefs upon unsuspecting audiences and essentially passive subjects. Rather, ideology can be conceptualised as a constantly moving, discursive apparatus or formation that has material effects in shaping both beliefs and actions and that derives its strength, in part, precisely because it is able to correspond and relate to aspects of people’s lived experiences that are ‘real’ in quite fundamental and significant ways. Ideology can be better thought of as partial and incomplete rather than simply false and illusory (Hall, 1986). It is an attempt to secure generalised and agreed-upon ways of understanding the world that reproduce dominant class privilege but that also remain prone to re-articulation at particular moments. As Hall has argued in the context of racist ideological constructs: ... racist interpellations can become themselves the sites and stake in the ideological struggle, occupied and redefined to become the elementary forms of an oppositional formation – as where ‘white racism’ is vigorously contested through the symbolic inversions of ‘black power’. The ideologies of racism remain contradictory structures, which can function both as the vehicles for the imposition of dominant ideologies, and as the elementary forms for the cultures of resistance. Any attempt to delineate the politics and ideologies of racism which omits these continuing features of struggle and contradiction wins an apparent adequacy of explanation only by operating a disabling reductionism. (Hall, 1980: 57) This implies of course that ideological frameworks, like social identities such as race, are never fixed. They are always contested, even as dominant blocs attempt to secure hegemonic leadership for their own world-view. Developing this idea regarding the ‘no necessary correspondence between a text and its politics’ (Grossberg, 1986: 158), that is, between ideology and language, Grossberg notes that the meanings attached to a ‘particular political position or social identity such as ‘ “democracy”, “freedom”, or “black”, or of a particular media practice, technology or social relationship are not guaranteed by its origins in a particular class structure. It is always capable of being de-articulated and re-articulated; it is a site of struggle’ (1986: 158; see also Larrain, 1994). This means, for example, that questions concerning the formation of racial identity assume a heightened political importance, as identities themselves are ‘fundamentally enmeshed in relations of power’ (Roseneil and Seymour, 1999: 2), racialised relations of power that are intimately connected to the representational politics of what I want to more specifically term the white sports/media complex. Mediated relationships and


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racialised discourses need to be better understood if contemporary forms of anti-racist praxis are to remain effective in challenging racism both within sport and society as a whole.

2008 witnessed the election of the first African-American President to the White House, symbolically signalling a momentous and historical shift within the United States of America’s long and arduous journey towards racial equality and justice. In the weeks and months following the election, a dominant narrative established itself within the American media as an explanation for Barack Obama’s historic victory. Both liberal and conservative commentators suggested that the United States was now ‘post-racial’, that the historical scars of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation life in the Americas, Jim Crow servitude, and the racial violence and discrimination against African-Americans in particular that continued even after the limited but important successes of the Civil Rights movement, had somehow been dissolved by the election. America had finally cleansed itself of its racial shame proving that, once again, the American Dream was alive and well in the Land of the Free. Shortly after the election, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an interviewer: I was enormously proud of Americans for I think setting race aside. I think what you really saw here was that race is no longer the factor in American identity and American life, and that’s a huge step forward ... But it is very clear that the message of America as a place that has overcome its wounds, America as a place where race didn’t matter in preventing the election of the first African American President.3 The feared ‘Bradley Effect’, the suggestion that whites would tell pollsters that they would vote for a black candidate but, when it came to the secrecy of the booth, vote against their stated political interests, had apparently not materialised. As the New York Times’ front page lead on the day after the election emphatically put it, ‘OBAMA: Racial barrier falls in decisive victory’.4 Sport itself was invoked as a way to make sense of this moment, with some commentators suggesting that Obama’s election was made possible precisely because athletes such as Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan had helped to condition whites into accepting the possibility that black accomplishment and success was both possible and desirable. Those who were willing to embrace black athletes, the argument went, were thus more likely to take the next step and vote for a black President. The journalist Michael Bianchi argued that ‘If you’re searching for tangible reasons why it became possible for Barack Obama to make his historic run at the presidency ... look


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no further than the golf course, basketball court or football field’ (cited in Zirin, 2008). Inter-racial contact on the sports field and white adulation for performing black bodies was seen to have changed the very meaning of blackness in white eyes, to the extent that blackness no longer produced emotions of fear, angst and dread but increasingly respect, admiration and even identification. Bianchi continued to note that ‘the two most successful product pitchmen of the modern era – Tiger [Woods] and Michael Jordan – are both black men who won over white corporate America’ (cited in Zirin, 2008). If corporate America had embraced black faces, why not the broader white American electorate? For others, the symbolic power of Obama’s run for office and his eventual election was deemed to have challenged and changed centuries-old racial prejudices concerning black intellectual and aesthetic inferiority (Fredrikson, 2002). The ‘Obama effect’ that generated widespread interest across the globe was credited with ushering in a wider change within the global formation of race when the pinnacle of high fashion, haute couture and the arbiter of European beauty that is Vogue Italia magazine published a special ‘Black Issue’ in July 2008. Contrary to the view that black women could not sell fashion magazines, the issue became a worldwide commercial success, making it the biggest selling issue in Vogue’s recent history. Earlier in what became known as the ‘Year of Obama’, basketball player LeBron James became the first African-American male to grace the front cover of the April 2008 American edition of Vogue, and in December 2008 Chloé Mortaud became the first black woman to be crowned ‘Miss France’. The black female form was no longer the abject, atavistic other against which ‘true beauty’ would be measured. Suddenly neither the American White House nor the European fashion houses seemed so universally white. In England, too, the November 2008 election of Barack Obama neatly coincided with Lewis Hamilton becoming the first black Formula One driving champion. Britain’s Monday morning papers were able to reflect on the previous day’s success for Hamilton alongside the potential election of Obama the following day. The Daily Mirror wondered if it was a ‘good omen’ that ‘a young, charismatic black man has shown resilience, skill and determination to win against the odds. Now roll on Barack Obama’ (Daily Mirror, 3 November 2008: 10), while Aida Edemariam’s (2008) Guardian article pushed the hyperbole even further, when she pondered whether the week that included a new black Formula One motor racing champion and a potential black American President would turn out to be the greatest ever in black history. Even the right-wing Sun newspaper felt compelled to extol on the significance of the ‘first black world motor racing champion’ in its leader, lavishly praising Hamilton, who earlier in the season had to deal with racist Spanish fans donning ‘black face’ and mocking his family. The Sun noted that Hamilton had shown great humility throughout his ordeals


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Spanish thugs painted their faces black and unfurled sick banners during a practice session in Barcelona. Only last week a Spanish website invited users to put a curse on Lewis and then displayed the vile, racist insults that poured in. Somehow, none of it fazes him. He is simply too well-balanced, too focused on his job ... It’s hard to believe he’s done all this at 23. He has years yet to achieve so much more. Lewis Hamilton is a true superstar on the world stage. We’re proud he’s ours’. (The Sun, ‘Hail, Our Lewis’, 3 November 2008: 8) Hamilton has become an iconic symbol for a new, twenty-first century style of English multiculturalism: a form of sporting multiculturalism that actively embraces England and Britain’s ethnic and racial diversity and that, particularly within the media, tends towards a self-congratulatory celebration of the nation’s successful approach to ‘social integration through sport’. In this regard black British athletes have been at the forefront of discussions concerning national identity, literally and figuratively embodying national success and achievement, both sporting and social. The terrace chants associated with elements of English football culture during the 1970s and 1980s of ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ (Gilroy, 1987), and the related political arguments for black and brown repatriation that produced these sentiments, seem barely imaginable from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century: a vantage point where black athletes (and increasingly South Asian athletes too) routinely represent the nation across a range of sports and where the England men’s national football team, so long seen as the bastion of white English patriarchal pride, is almost inconceivable today without the presence of black players. (It also appears that the team has to be managed by superior foreign coaches who seem to understand the game at the highest levels better than any English-born coach possibly could.) However, this ‘vision of success’, notes Malik (2002: 123), is not unproblematic. Malik argues that, on the one hand, the televisual image of Black-British gold-medal winning athletes draped in a Union Jack ... marks a public confirmation that we have explicitly arrived at being Black-British; on the other, it is a reminder of the stubborn forms of resistance which still deny Black people as ‘authentic’ members of the nation in other areas of public life and, moreover, often in the sporting arena itself. (2002: 123)


and was a true role model and national hero, in part because he was willing to stoically ‘turn the other cheek’ when faced with racism:

In other words, the hyper-visibility of black and occasionally brown bodies within the sporting fields of the nation stands in stark contrast to many other areas of British civic life (especially national politics) and even other


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areas within the sports infrastructure and institutions outside the playing arena. It is important, then, to understand the role of the white sport/media complex as not just relaying or re-presenting a version of reality to audiences, and not even as simply heightening and amplifying an existing racial world already out there, neatly intact, but in very fundamental ways constituting that reality for us. The meaning of race, and related questions of national belonging, regional identity, gender performance and sexual mores, only make sense within the representational boundaries produced via language, images and discourse more generally, within which the sport/media complex plays an increasingly important role. In other words, any critical analysis of race and the sport/media complex has to go beyond simply pointing out the effects of ‘negative images’ and the reproduction of racial stereotypes. We need instead to push our analyses into the more difficult space of understanding, as Hall puts it, that ‘the media play a part in the formation, in the constitution, of the things that they reflect. It is not that there is a world outside, “out there”, which exists free of discourses of representation. What is “out there” is, in part, constituted by how it is represented. The reality of race in any society is, to coin a phrase, “media-mediated” ’. (Hall 1992: 14) Such an analysis, therefore, requires us to constantly hold in tension the deep ambivalences of contemporary racial structures wherein the ‘double syntax of racism’ (Hall 1992: 17) operates by both denying its very register while producing, often metonymically, profoundly compelling representations of racial alterity.5 The complex and dynamic structure of racism is arguably heightened within the white sports/media complex precisely by sport’s own reliance upon the human body as its ontological foundational object and the fact that race has, in many ways, always been a story about power and difference that is written onto the body itself (Spickard, 2007). Sport is seen at one and the same time to confirm the arrival of a post-racial settlement and to offer self-evidential proof of the existence and undeniability of the facts of racial difference. The invention of the idea of ‘the black athlete’ at the beginning of the twentieth century served to keep alive colonial myths of inherent black degeneracy by the creation of a powerful racial trope – the black athlete – that transcended and transformed nineteenth century notions of black physical inferiority, elevating blackness into a desirable marker of achievement and success, while simultaneously allowing for the reproduction of racialised discourses of savagery, laziness, aggression and animalism into the post/colonial present (Carrington, 2010). ‘Primitivism, savagery, guile, unreliability’, notes Hall (1992: 17), ‘are always just below the surface, just waiting to bite’, especially, I would add, within the definitional scaffolding of how the black athlete is understood and represented within contemporary media spaces. It is worth reflecting that while LeBron James was indeed featured on the front cover of Vogue,


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the cover image of James alongside model Gisele Bündchen owed more to nineteenth-century depictions of black animalism and the threats posed by black male sexuality towards white femininity than it did to showcasing ‘the world’s best bodies’. In an almost direct replication of the iconic images of King Kong, the photographer Annie Leibovitz shot James dressed in an all-black basketball uniform, snarling ‘ape-like’ into the camera, his mouth gaping, white teeth bared and his tongue clearly visible. James is positioned in a wide stance; while his heavily tattooed right arm bounces a basketball, his left ‘cups’ the body of the white female that is Bündchen, her blonde hair flowing dramatically back as though, à la King Kong/the beast from Africa, she is being swept off her feet. Writing for ESPN, the sports journalist Jemele Hill (2008) noted that: Maybe the point was to show the contrast between brawn and beauty, masculinity and femininity, strength versus grace. But Vogue’s quest to highlight the differences between superstar athletes and supermodels only successfully reinforces the animalistic stereotypes frequently associated with black athletes ... it’s important to question who was in the room when the cover decisions were made. As it is, LeBron was the first African–American male to grace Vogue’s cover. Too bad it will be memorable for the wrong reasons.

Big Ron, colour-blind racism and white privilege Given the way in which the contemporary postmodern spectacle of race continues to produce complex and contradictory effects, it is vital that antiracists are able to avoid what Gilroy once called the ‘moralistic excesses practised in the name of “anti-racism” ’ (1990: 191). Anti-racist interventions are too often limited to moral denouncements over particular speech acts, which inevitably lead to questions related to the intent (or otherwise) of the actor(s) involved. The problem of racism is thus reduced to the subjective, personal and ethical failures of particular individuals, negating or precluding any broader discussion concerning the objective, structural and social determinates of racial discourse itself (Shohat and Stam 1994: 201). The opportunity to discuss the complexities of race is thus lost in the moralistic outrage, counter-claim, and normally public apology that follows the predictable and largely pre-scripted events produced by the latest ‘race row’. To return to Big Ron, I want to suggest that this particular moment presented just such an opportunity, though in the end not fully realised, through which to develop a more critical form of anti-racist intervention of the type that tends to be missing within most public discussions. No doubt much of Atkinson’s subsequent attempt to take ‘ownership’ of his comments and to reflect upon them stemmed from a simple desire to regain his fairly lucrative media contracts and the accompanying sponsorship and




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marketing deals that he lost in the aftermath. Leaving to one side the sincerity and intent of Atkinson’s motivations for doing so, what was interesting in the weeks and months after the episode itself was the way in which a broader debate about the meaning of racism, and crucially of white identity, became possible through Atkinson’s own attempt to make sense of what had happened by directly engaging in a dialogue with some of his black detractors. A moment, in other words, where white anti-black racism was not just examined but exposed, and where the contradictions of white privilege were confronted and discussed rather than simply denied or denounced. A week after his comments aired, Atkinson was interviewed by Michael Eboda, editor of the black newspaper New Nation. Atkinson was quoted as saying ‘What I said is racist, I understand that, but I’m not a racist’ (Eboda 2004: 3). With Atkinson, according to Eboda, seemingly close to tears, he again remarked: Look, all I can say is sorry, I genuinely did not mean to offend anybody. What else can I say? I’m an idiot, but I’m not a racist. A racist is someone who won’t give a black man a chance. My actions over the years prove that I have no problem with that. Not to my knowledge. I’m hoping that people look at the broader picture and see all the good I’ve done. I’ve never used that word before. You know what, if somebody had said what I said about Desailly to one of my players, I would have got ‘em by the throat and chinned ‘em. Later in the interview Atkinson asks Eboda directly if he thinks he (that is, Atkinson) is racist. Eboda (2004: 3) writes: He listens intently to my reply: ‘I don’t think you are a racist, but I do think you have a racist element in you and I don’t think you are aware of what racism is. No, you don’t see colour when you are giving a person a job, and that’s how it’s meant to be, but you come from an era when certain things were acceptable and I think you are not quite aware of what those things are. That’s when you can become racist. I think that in the instant that you used the term ‘nigger’ you were a racist. I don’t think that had Desailly been white you would have mentioned his colour. You might have called him a lazy bastard, but you certainly wouldn’t have called him a ‘lazy, white nigger’. He doesn’t contradict me. I expect we’ll see him back in the TV studios before long.


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This, in some ways, offered an interesting moment of anti-racist intervention. The exchange, and Atkinson’s response, is frank and honest, yet also full of contradictions. In interviews at the time and since, Atkinson seemed genuinely perplexed at both why he had said what he had and what he considered to be an over-reaction to his words, especially given his record. He


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was shifted out of the comfort zone of white male privilege that saturates men’s professional football, despite the veneer of cosmopolitan internationalism that frames how the game is represented. Despite some genuine reflection on his words and what they meant, Atkinson ultimately stops short from engaging with a true reckoning of his problematic embrace of a form of colour-blindness that holds on to an abstract conception of universal liberalism in which players are judged by their ability and not by the colour of their skin, but which in reality still retreats back into and relies upon deeply racialised notions of evaluating and describing sporting bodies. Racism is once again reduced to the personal and the inexplicable – even Eboda refers to Atkinson’s ‘one moment of madness’ (2004: 3), as if racism was not in fact often rational and strategic, a part of the everyday structures of feeling of nations, especially those that were reliant upon the material and symbolic benefits of colonial expansion in their very founding. Identifying racist hooligans, far-right white supremacists and ‘the insane’ as the sole actors and agents of racism simply allows the ‘mainstream’ to suspend any serious engagement with the complicity of ‘good’ citizens, honourable patriots, and even whites who like and hire blacks, in the reproduction of racialised ways of seeing the world and the dehumanising logic that underpins such discourses. Atkinson’s potentially important and somewhat admirable attempt to engage in a broader discussion as to what constitutes racism and his ultimate failure to recognise that one could be both an admirer of forms of black performance and even have ‘black friends’, while still benefiting from forms of white privilege that are themselves predicated upon notions of white supremacy, meant that the moment was lost. His defenders, including many black football players, spoke to his long-term commitment to hiring black players and the warm friendships he had with many. His detractors mirrored the knee-jerk defence, castigating Atkinson for his unremitting racism. Darcus Howe, for example, argued that ‘Atkinson lives in a world apart from those of us who engage daily in the battle for racial equality. It is because of people like him that we need laws against antisocial behaviour’ (2004a).6 What was also missed in the subsequent ‘analysis’ and debate was that Atkinson was actually referring to how black players are viewed within contemporary footballing cultures. Although, of course, this implicated Atkinson himself, his exact words, we recall, talked of ‘some schools’ of thought within the game. In other words, Atkinson was revealing a usually hidden aspect of white talk: that it takes place in the backstage areas of whiteness where public prohibitions on racist speech are lessened to a certain degree, and the public pretence of colour-blind, race-neutral language can be dropped (Picca and Feagin, 2007). We should remember, too, that Atkinson made his remarks in conversation with the white presenter Clive Tyldesley. Tyldesley, apparently, made no attempt to challenge Atkinson’s




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remarks and neither did Atkinson feel that the space of a television studio was anything other than a safe space within which to make such statements. In other words, Atkinson’s comments revealed the deeply embedded normative whiteness of the sports/media complex, where nearly all of the structures from television production, to radio commentary to the print media, remain overwhelmingly white and male, a situation that unsurprisingly remains largely unremarked upon by the media themselves. Beyond occasional ‘guest commentaries’ from former players, the lead presentational duties and the creative production of sports media texts, especially in the UK but even in the US, remain a largely all-white affair (Malik, 2002: 126). As the political commentator Martin Jacques notes: The power structures of the game accord with those of other major British institutions: the preponderance of white people and the chronic under-representation of ethnic minorities. The reason the situation is so shocking in football is that this is a game which – from the Premiership to the amateur leagues – palpably involves a huge number of black players. The natural progression is from player to manager, and yet this route is blocked for black players. And the cause of this is nothing to do with potential or ability, but a belief that black players may perform well on the pitch but are not suitable to lead and manage. These are stereotypes that are manifest throughout society, as evidenced by the paucity of black people in positions of authority. This is why there is little adverse comment about the state of football: in a white-dominated society this remains the norm and, consequently, it is barely noticed and rarely commented on in football. There should be zero tolerance of the outrageous double standards which prevail in football: that black players are acceptable but black managers are not, that the virtual absence of black presenters or pundits from the studios, or of black representatives from the corridors of the FA, is somehow fine. A concerted effort by leading figures in football, the media, MPs and football fans could shift attitudes and help to make soccer a model for other sports, and even for society more widely. (Jacques, 2009) In the end, Atkinson’s comments served as much to conceal contemporary forms of racism and demonstrate the limits to anti-racist forms of intervention in and around sport as they did to highlight the presence of racism within the white sport/media complex, English football and British society more generally. Atkinson, as with much of the mainstream media, remained silent as to what it might mean to accept that racism resides within the sporting centre and not just the racially exceptional exterior; the liberal sports establishment, committed to public declarations if not quite actions of antiracism, reassured itself that racism would not be tolerated and distanced itself from Atkinson’s comments; and critical ‘anti-racist’ commentators


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largely failed to generate any substantive discussion about the contemporary meaning of racism, beyond excoriating the man himself.

It is important to remember, as Bonnett notes, that the history of antiracism has been the history of organised struggles by various actors and communities, of: ordinary people, outside of the control of state or international agencies and often unaligned to any political party. Most anti-racist organisation has arisen not from formal political initiatives or bureaucracies but from the necessity and desire of people to do something about the existence of racial oppression in their lives. (2000: 86) An argument could reasonably be made that anti-racist organising by players and sports fans, most notably in the UK by football supporters connected to Kick it Out and other fan-based initiatives in sports such as cricket and rugby league, has led the way in helping to challenge overt forms of racism and in generating wider discussions about ethics and morality within the public sphere. It is striking that anti-racism in sport, whether found in the policy initiatives of sports governing bodies, support-based activism, or the public banners, signs and announcements that now seem to dominate international sporting events, has a public profile higher than any other form of contemporary anti-racist politics. Anti-racism in sport presents a curious mix of the local and organic, forged from a politics of solidarity and mutualism, alongside the corporate and institutional, the latter now driven by the politics of diversity management and ‘anti-racist’ sports capitalism. It is a form of anti-racism, in other words, as likely to be enacted by fans standing outside a stadium as it is bought and sold to audiences via a Nike wrist band and matching celebrity poster. As Malik (2002: 126) warns, ‘When the Utopian ethos of today’s fully-fledged urban “trainer culture” quite unreservedly uses anti-racism as a commercial logo and depends on the corporatisation and capitalist buzzwords of freedom, unanimity and universality (think of Tiger Woods and the Nike® promotions), further questions are raised about the power of sport as a meaningful source of popular anti-racism’. While such forms of anti-racist corporate ‘co-option’ must be carefully studied and evaluated for their intent and effect, it would equally be a mistake to dismiss or understate the changed environment that has been brought about by successful forms of anti-racist theory, research and action over the past two decades or more. This is not to endorse or support any naively optimistic reading of the effectiveness of such struggles, nor to conclude that such work is complete and not without its own elisions. Although this


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is no longer the case, earlier forms of anti-racist praxis in sport, in the UK at least, were overly concerned with identifying individual racist actors among supporters and players, thus diverting attention from the broader patterns of institutional white privilege within sports governing bodies, associations and organisations, and particularly, as I have argued here, media institutions. And, more worryingly, it has taken anti-racist organisations in sport (and indeed the academic community and policy-makers) too long to think seriously about the ‘intersectionality of racism’ with other forms of discrimination that are articulated through questions of gender and sexuality in particular. Racism is often co-articulated with deeply gendered and often virulently homophobic forms of hate speech and violence that an overly narrow and exclusive concern with ‘race’ bypasses. Developing a critical and open-ended form of anti-racist politics, able to account for the changes brought about by the complexities of twenty-first century racisms, remains an urgent and difficult task. Such a task will require of us the ability to acknowledge the limits to the forms of anti-racist interventions that have relied upon too static a definition of racism and that have sometimes failed to think beyond the predictable if often difficult terrain that we have found ourselves fighting within. Denouncing racist comments, for example, as well as ‘negative’, distorting images, is a necessary but not sufficient form of anti-racist intervention. Too often the moralistic outrage that should be the starting point for a wider ethical discussion concerning the complex reproduction of racist ideology in an age where few claim to be racist, also becomes the end point. This is especially the case when such moments arise within the mass media. Calls for the said offender to be fired are debated, an apology of sorts is (normally) offered, both sides of the argument either defend without thought or denounce with zeal, before everyone retreats back to their positions ready for the next racial ‘slip’, when the predictable dance takes place again, albeit with new dancers choreographed into the same moves. In a situation where the future divisions and fault lines of global society are increasingly marked by the politics of difference – ‘the terrifying, internal fear ... of living with difference’ (Hall 1992: 17) – and where the progressive social movements (if they exist in any meaningful way at all today) of international socialism, Civil Rights, and the varied struggles against neocolonialism, no longer provide the symbolic resources to sustain a mass anti-racist movement, we need to think anew and more creatively about the forms of anti-racism that are possible under such conditions, and what the end goals of such a project should be. It is one of the recurring challenges facing anti-racism that its utopian agenda has tended, understandably in certain historical moments, to remain unarticulated compared to the necessity to act, to engage and to challenge the immediacy of the racism faced. Or to put it more reductively, we know what we’re against, but what are we for?


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Contrary to the claims of its more unreflexive boosters, sport does not offer a present-day model of a post-racial society and virtuous form of sociality that is free from the corrosive effects of racism, but it does offer a powerful future-oriented insight into what such a society might look like. We should remember that while the orthodox Marxist accounts of sport as a distorting mirror, a spectacle that hides and blinds us to the underlying realities of social inequality and racism, contains a truth of sorts, it is not the full story. Resistance to the spectacle and spectacular forms of resistance (Bélanger, 2009) within the overdeveloped West are always possible and in fact made more likely by the very precarious nature of the white sports/ media complex itself, dependent, as it is, on the unpredictability of sport narratives and the powerful passions and emotions they invoke. Given this, ‘interventions’ in and around sport – especially when there are few other credible and mass forms of anti-racist politics around – become all the more important. In this context Gilroy (2009) has warned of a certain pessimism that has infected forms of politics that claim the mantle of anti-racism. A so-called ‘realist’ approach to ‘race’ and racism, Gilroy argues, concedes that such social divisions are so deeply engrained within modern societies that a truly transformative politics is not possible. Resigned to simply acknowledging that ‘race’ does not really exist as a tenable biological category but that its ‘real-world’ impact means that all we, as anti-racists, can do is to use scare quotes around the term and then carry on as if it does exist, has become the predictable and standard line among many anti-racists. Gilroy notes: Enthusiastically or reluctantly, we are resigned to the facts of race and absolute ethnicity. There is no alternative. The pragmatic political goal is to minimize racism while leaving the stolid architecture of racial and ethnic difference intact. Thus race emerges as a problem of diversity management. Most mainstream commentary holds to the notion that the worst effects of racial hierarchy have to be addressed, but any vague discomfort at their occasional excesses is tempered by a gnawing sense of inevitability. So, anti-racism decays further and becomes nothing much more than a means for rescuing race from racism. (2009: 18, emphasis in the original) Are we able, then, to go beyond this state of affairs and to think seriously about how sport may offer a way to construct a credible and realisable cosmopolitan ethics of solidarity that is grounded in the emphatically human potentiality of our common species-being? To produce a politics that would re-write the bodily narratives of sport, not to further reify the category of ‘race’ but instead to reduce race’s significance to something far less important than the colour of the athlete’s shirt? If we are, then challenging racism in sport may offer an important opportunity to transcend the racial scaffolding surrounding society in order to make real the utopian




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goal of a society free from racism in which sporting success and failure would be read as an inherent condition of being human, rather than the outcome of racial exceptionalism.

1. Jhally further qualified his argument by noting that what advertisers are actually buying is time, or rather the media sell the watching time of audiences to advertisers. This is important for Jhally in terms of his attempt to think the sports/media complex in broadly Marxist categories of labour power and value: ‘Just as workers sell labor power to capitalists so audiences sell watching power to media owners, and just as the use-value of labor power is labor, so the use-value of watching power is watching, the capacity to watch ... [F]or audiences, program-time is watching as consumption for the reproduction of watching power, while advertising time is watching as production for the creation of the commodity, audience time, for sale to advertisers’ (1984: 47, emphasis in the original). 2. Rowe argues that the economy of sport requires more than an analysis of market exchange, wage levels and general financial expenditure as there is also a cultural economy of sport ‘where information, images, ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where metaphorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of exchange-listed sports clubs) stocks rise and fall. This cultural (and material) economy of sport has developed through “cottage industry” and early industrial and capital accumulative phases to a full blown, sophisticated complex. Once elements of sport had become rationalized and industrialized, they necessarily entered into relations with other economic entities which acted as conduits, carrying sports culture far beyond its places of origin ... [T]he institution (which, more accurately, is a constellation of diverse but related structures and practices) that has become crucial to the destiny of modern sport is the media’ (Rowe 1999: 23–24). 3. Quoted in Wingfield and Feagin, (2010: 1). 4. In actuality, Obama, nation-wide, did not win the white vote. Although Obama won a majority of the white vote among white Americans under 30, that was the only white demographic that voted for him over John McCain, with white men in particular breaking strongly for the Republican candidate. Contrary to popular mis-beliefs concerning the 2008 US Presidential election, even white independents voted for McCain over Obama. Obama was supported in overwhelming numbers by African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, thus it could be argued that Obama won the election in spite of the voting patterns of whites (see Carrington, 2009). 5. We should recall that while putatively ‘objective’ criteria for measuring beauty have historically been suffused with norms that elevated white (normally female) forms as the epitome of aesthetic perfection, the white European imagination has always and at the same time fetishised the non-European Other. From Josephine Baker and Donyale Luna, to Iman and Grace Jones, black femininity as the exotic Other continues to structure western representations of black ‘beauty’, and black womanhood in particular (see Powell 2008). Thus, as with the Vogue Italia ‘Black Special’, the supposed ‘celebration’ of blackness serves to reproduce its very exceptionality to the (white) norm. This is heightened in a situation where the major fashion houses, photography studios, modelling and advertising agencies and


Notes


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leading magazines continue to be run, owned, managed and overwhelmingly staffed by white personnel, thus further ensuring the invisibility of white privilege and the production of blackness as a marker of exceptional (if occasionally ‘desired’) difference. 6. In an earlier article, Howe outlined a number of previous offensive statements that Atkinson has apparently made over the years and questioned, in his characteristically frank way, any suggestion that Atkinson was anything other than a racist brute: ‘So steeped is football in racist muck that nobody thought Atkinson’s [prior] behaviour exceptional. Even black people accepted it. He demanded from them, and got, gratitude for letting darkies into the game. Hence several black players were at the front of the queue saying that, though his remarks on Desailly were wrong, he is no racist. Then what is he? A leader in the vanguard of anti-racism? All I have to say to Atkinson is: “Get thee hence”. In case he doesn’t know what that means, I’ll translate into dressing-room jargon: “Fuck off” ’ (Howe, 2004b).




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7 Race Matters in Australian Sport

The first officials and transported convicts ‘Down Under’ disliked, disdained and then disregarded the humanity of the native peoples. Starting with white settlement in 1788, Aborigines were seen essentially as ‘other’ – not just different in quality but as other than human, and treated accordingly for long periods. This was despite edicts from the British Colonial Office to maintain friendly relations, not to disturb Aboriginal lands, to provide them with food, shelter, ‘gratuitous medical assistance and relief’ (Dunstan 1966: 315–6). The newcomers, including Christian missionaries, described them variously as ‘odious’, ‘scarcely human’, ‘hideous to look at’, ‘steeped in infamy’, ‘rotten in things sexual’, ‘sins against creation’, ‘wild animals’, ‘loathsome’, ‘vermin’ and a ‘nuisance’ (Tatz 1999: 15). Disparateness was [and is] pervasive and inescapable. It became genocidal in two forms: first, by physical killing, and second, by the forcible transfer of their children into the mainstream society, part of a eugenicist fantasy to facilitate the disappearance of Aboriginality.

The respect factor Nearly 40 years ago I compared race politics in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. There is, I said, a direct correlation between the extent of indigenous rights and the degree to which the native peoples fought, or are fighting, against the dominant society (Tatz, 1972: 19–20). I called this ‘the respect factor’: the more respect, the greater the rights. Respect doesn’t have to mean a liking or a regard for; it can have the negative attribute of fear, even hatred. It means that the people concerned are ‘people of account’, to be taken into account and not relegated or consigned to the status of non-persons. Even in the worst of the apartheid years, black South Africans were regarded as a people of account by virtue of their numbers, military prowess, political and social organisation, animal husbandry and crop-growing. Maori as tribal warriors, modern soldiers, successful farmers and mighty players of religious rugby command respect. Less so the Indians


Colin Tatz

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and Inuit of Canada and – perhaps until the last two or three decades – so much less so the Aborigines, the people aptly described as the most totally conquered minority in Western history (Rowley, 1970: 2–9). Until the 1970s Aborigines were treated as mute, malleable and movable, child-like and childish. Since there was no [obvious] audible or visible resistance in the forms we recognise – such as protest marches, strikes or violence – they seemed acquiescent in all that was done to or for them. For nearly a century, Aborigines were administered on the ‘scientific’ premises of men like Professor Baldwin Spencer, biologist and Australian Rules football administrator who became Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory: The aboriginal is, indeed, a very curious mixture: mentally, about the level of a child who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to violent fits of temper ... He has no sense of responsibility and, except in rare cases, no initiative’. (Spencer, 1913) Alas, he wrote, they didn’t even realise that they could make clothes out of kangaroo skins and, crucially, they didn’t cultivate crops or domesticate animals. The commodity of land, and the concomitant of labouring on it or profiting from it, was what the eighteenth-century philosopher John Locke considered the incarnation of civilisation: ergo, the Aboriginal huntergatherers were uncivilised and would remain so until they understood our concept of property. In recent times, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have fought hard in three arenas: in the politics of land rights and the acquisition of some very real estate across the continent, on several cultural stages both here and abroad and, especially, on the sports fields. They have become ambiguous peoples, still denigrated racially but sometimes considered of virtue and value.

Ambiguity in race politics The ambiguity has been stark. Aborigines were people but not people. They were ferae naturae, wild animals, and hence courts would come to deem the land terra nullius, an uninhabited or barbarous land, when the settlers arrived. Later, they belonged as part of the nation but they were still regarded as outside the nation’s ‘universe of obligation’, and therefore disposable. For some legal purposes they were citizens, yet in a practical sense ‘uncitizens’ for much of their daily lives. Subject to the ‘majesty’ of the law, in practice they were, and are, unprotected by its elementary rights and writs (discussed later). Harsh and special laws applied only to them in a separate (and unchallengeable) legal system. To assimilate them into white society by placement in special institutions, they were ‘readily’ removed from parents


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because, as one Chief Protector reported, ‘no matter how frantic [a mother’s] momentary grief might be at the time ... they soon forget their offspring’ (Gale, 1909: 9). British subjects, they were eventually protected by special laws and severe geographic isolation to save them from those who, in no particular order, wanted to kill them, remove their children, take their women or sell them opium. The protections soon became gross discriminations and violations of fundamental rights. Elementary services – health care, schools, sanitation, clean water, electricity, passable roads, adequate nutrition, basic housing, minimum wages, sport and leisure facilities – have been systematically absent, or denied, or provided half-heartedly, intermittently, inadequately, shoddily, maladroitly, even as this is written. Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote aptly enough (in a different context) that we ‘do not do what we must do, obstinately never quite doing what must be done, but at best doing things only halfway, and even that grudgingly’ (Dürrenmatt, 1990: 33). The latest in a long line of governmental policy slogans is ‘closing the gap’: reducing the difference between white male life expectancy, now said to be 77 to 79, and Aboriginal male life expectancy, ostensibly 57 to 59. The reality, rather than the statistical probability, is that in this land of ‘the fair go’ few Aboriginal men live beyond 50 – for a host of socio-economic and politico-legal reasons, not because of a genetic predisposition to die, or to want to die, early.

Abnormal society The primary social indicators – life expectancy, infant mortality and morbidity rates, prevalence of communicable diseases, deaths from nonnatural causes, school attainments, annual incomes – show that Aborigines do not live the way other Australians do. When he was campaigning for sports boycotts in the most vicious years of apartheid, Hassan Howa declared that ‘there can be no normal sport in an abnormal society’. What would he have made of the Aboriginal experience and the omnipresent racism in the lives of Aborigines, then and now? Racism in organised sport focuses on the demeaning abuse of players by players and by fans. Most codes of conduct, especially in the four football genres, still treat ‘sledging’ (an Australian term for such abuse) as a form of illness that requires in camera counselling, the offender meeting the offendee in private, conciliation, offers of apology and promises not to repeat the insult, and the ‘victim-patient’, hopefully, healed. Game suspensions and hefty fines have begun, but illness remains the core diagnosis of these ‘social misdemeanours’ and faux pas. Insulting people is hardly on the same level as promiscuous and wholesale slaughter. The organised massacres of the nineteenth century were essentially perpetrated by settlers, with the state authorities in the role of


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bystanders. Later, state-run Native Police Forces became the instruments of killings. Settlers killed some 10,000 Aborigines in the colony of Queensland between 1824 and 1908. In 1883, the British High Commissioner in Queensland complained to the Prime Minister of England that Aborigines were regarded ‘as vermin to be cleared off the face of the earth’ and: ‘men of culture and refinement ... talk, not only of the wholesale butchery ... but of the individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or having to kill some troublesome animal’ (Evans et al., 1988: 78). In 1896, Archibald Meston was appointed Special Commissioner to investigate the Aboriginal condition. ‘Men and women [were] hunted like wild beasts’; ‘kidnapping of women and nameless outrages were reported’; in 25 years, one tribe of 3,000 ‘was down to 100 survivors’ as a result of ‘the old style of “dispersal” ’; ‘boys and girls were frequently taken from their parents ... with no chance of returning’. All of this was ‘a reproach to our common humanity’ (Meston, 1896: 723–36). The ‘only way to arrest their destruction’, to ‘save any part of the race from extinction’, was to abolish the [homicidal] Native Police Force, ban opium, and ensure the ‘absolute isolation’ from the whites who – ‘coloured by prejudice, distorted by ignorance’ – committed ‘shameful deeds’ (Meston, 1896: 733–34). Could one play cricket and run track races amid such genocidal killings? Yes, up to a point. During the general carnage there was just enough freedom to bat, bowl and run (Tatz 1995b). In the 1890s, a number of Aborigines were playing cricket at Deebing Creek, near Ipswich, Queensland. Townspeople felt that ‘every encouragement should be given to our ebony brethren’ and people came to watch. They ‘behaved like white gentlemen’, said the Queensland Times. The Colonial Secretary, shortly before he received Meston’s report, sent the Aborigines two cricket bats ‘in appreciation of their excellent behaviour and smart turn-out’. Across the land, cricket and massacres were widespread. Colony Victoria was the first to enact a safeguard, the Aborigines Protection Act 1869. One year earlier, an Aboriginal cricket team toured England, a decade before a white team ventured abroad. The story is that an Edenhope grazier sent pictures of ‘his’ Aborigines to the owners of the Melbourne Cricket Ground refreshment tent, suggesting matches (Mulvaney and Harcourt, 1988). In Western Victoria pastoralists had taught their servants the game because they and their sons had no one else to play against. The names their ‘owners’ assigned to them illustrated their paternalistic attitudes: Jim Crow, Sundown, Redcap, Tarpot, King Cole, Mosquito, Tiger, Bullocky. Amid talk of commercial exploitation and associated skulduggery, and despite much illness among the players, hotelier Charles Lawrence agreed to coach an Aboriginal team for an English tour. The team landed in England in May 1868, played 47 matches for 19 draws, 14 wins and 14 losses. Two players were ill enough to be sent home and King Cole died of tuberculosis on tour.




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Historic, heroic, romantic, the subject of three books and innumerable photographic reproductions, the tour was also the beginning of sport exploitation, bad faith and ill treatment. The star of the tour, Johnny Mullagh (named after Mullagh Station, where he worked), was the only player to establish a cricket career on his return. Later research has established that there was indignity, even cruelty, as the players went unpaid, were housed inadequately, and regarded as quaint circus-freak performers of various native sports rather than of cricket (Sampson, 2009b). Had the Protection Board been in existence a year earlier, the famous tour would not have taken place. In 1850, Reverend Matthew Blagden Hale wanted to protect Aborigines from ‘a vicious portion of the white population’ (Tatz, 1995b: 47–8). At Poonindie, near Port Lincoln in South Australia, he introduced cricket to overcome a ‘native temperament’ said to be distressed by ‘continuous labour’, illness and ‘flagging spirits’. The Aboriginal team won all but one of its local matches. Watching a match against a public school in Adelaide in 1872, Anglican Bishop Short wrote that the game proved ‘incontestably that the Anglican aristocracy of England and the “noble savage”, who ran wild in the Australian woods, are linked together in one brotherhood of blood – moved by the same passions, desires, and affections’. Not so. Legal and physical separation of Aborigines were already under way. Increasing ill health, white complaints and pressure from neighbouring farmers to acquire Aboriginal land led to the end of the mission, and its cricket, in 1895. Professional athletics, pedestrianism, was a major gambling sport of the nineteenth century. Aborigines – seeking to escape incarceration on isolated reserves – were very good at it. Charlie Samuels, christened by his sheep property ‘owner’ as Sambo Combo, was the kingpin of the 1880s and 1890s. The leading sports paper, The Referee, wrote in 1894 that: it might be a more pleasant reflection to Australians, perhaps, if a white man could be quoted as champion [of Australia] ... but a black aboriginal has to be accorded the laurel crown ... [He was] one of the best exponents of sprint running the world has ever seen’. (Tatz, 1995b: 95)1 Officials created obstacles from the 1880s to the 1920s. So did the white athletes who wrote to the Governor of Queensland asking him to ban all Aborigines at Fraser Island – because they always won. When Aborigines became prominent, separate initials began appearing after each runner’s name in the official race programmes, indicating that ‘a’ was Aboriginal, ‘h.c.’ a ‘half-caste’, and ‘c.p.’ a ‘coloured person’. This practice lasted for some 40 years, but at least Aborigines were participants in the spiked-shoe business. In 1976, Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls became, briefly [due to illness], the Governor of South Australia. He remains the only Aboriginal knight of the


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[Imperial] realm. He hailed from Cummeragunja (Cummera), a mission on the Murray River between New South Wales and Victoria, a small community that produced an assembly line of athletes, Australian Rules footballers, political figures and human rights activists. Doug tried out for Carlton Football Club but was told that because of his colour, he smelled. Fitzroy FC took him and his Australian Rules career was illustrious in the early 1930s. A champion sprinter, in 1929 Nicholls won the 120 yards Warracknabeal Gift and with it a prize of 100 guineas (about $A235 at face value) – a staggering sum, given that the total annual income for Cummera’s 140 farming people the previous year was a mere five times his winnings. Nicholls had a stronger motive to run than to reap. Cummera began as a private mission in 1874. Daniel Matthews, an Echuca merchant, ran the original Maloga Mission on strictly religious principles. For him, cricket was ‘an uncivilising activity’; Aborigines saw things differently. Matthews’ biographer, Nancy Cato (1976: 128), wrote: ‘They had discovered that their prowess in sport, particularly in cricket and running, gave them a passport to the white man’s world, even to his respect and friendship’. He tried to prevent that passage. The Nicholls story is, of course, an extraordinary one, but he did establish that sport was an escape from rigid isolation and an avenue to some respect and social acceptance, even if transiently for the most part.

Monumental contradictions At least 15 public monuments honour Aboriginal and Islander sports men and women. Victoria has an obelisk for sprinter Bobby Kinnear, and an oval and an edifice for cricketer Johnny Mullagh; a Melbourne street plaque commemorates jockey Peter St Albans, winning jockey in the 1876 Melbourne Cup, while a suburban community centre is named after Doug Nicholls. In New South Wales, three memorials celebrate middleweight boxer Dave Sands, killed in a truck accident at age 26. Twice voted the most popular sportsman in Australia (1950 and 1951), his funeral drew one of the largest crowds ever seen in that state. The centre court at Homebush is named after tennis champion Evonne Goolagong, twice Wimbledon singles champion (1971, 1980). Two Queensland streets, in Cherbourg and in Dalby, commemorate boxer Jerry Jerome, the first Aborigine to win a national title (the middleweight championship in 1912). The entrance to Canberra Stadium has a life-size statue of Laurie Daley and the main stand bears the name of Mal Meninga, a South Sea Islander, tributes to their rugby league achievements in the 1980s and 1990s. In Perth, the ‘Polly’ Farmer Room at Subiaco Oval honours the great Australian Rules footballer (1953–1967); and in Darwin, the stadium restaurant is named after Tiwi Island footballer David Kantilla (1960s). A statue of the 1930s fast bowler Eddie Gilbert, unveiled in November 2008, overlooks the headquarters of Queensland Cricket in Brisbane.




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These tributes don’t tell their stories. Rather, they omit the realities of the lives they celebrate. Sport, wrote the late Ron Pickering (of the BBC), is based on an ethos of play, competition and opportunities being fair and equal for all. For Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and the South Sea Islanders – descendants of those ‘blackbirded’, that is, kidnapped, chained and taken to Australia to work in sugar plantations between 1863 and 1904 – there has been exclusion from competition, discrimination within it, and at times gross inequality of chances, choices and facilities, even in the early years of this new century. They have also had to overcome well-trained and talented opponents. Sport is a litmus and litany of ambiguity for Aboriginal athletes: there has been both denigration and adulation, contempt and respect, calumny and celebration, tolerance and bigotry, inclusion and exclusion.

The sport of inclusion In the 1870s, the people at Coranderrk, near Healesville in Victoria, had proved themselves as farmers, musicians, cricketers, Christians and as peaceful and successful political demonstrators. Their success in crop-growing irritated their antagonistic white neighbours. Yet their cricket team won acceptance, and many games. Their Australian Rules football team, Badger Creek, was readily received and in 1906 contained a most uncommon man, Joseph Wandin, who became the first Aboriginal principal of a state primary school. The school was restored for centenary celebrations in 1994, but by then – and despite the earlier Aboriginal gains before royal commissions and parliamentary inquiries in the 1870s and 1880s – Coranderrk was no more, reduced to a quarter-acre plot with a memorial gravestone. The rest became white suburbia, and a popular zoo. Imperial Britain used cricket as a civilising force in some colonies. But that a non-English-speaking Spanish monk should so view the game is quite startling. In 1879, Abbot Rosendo Salvado established a New Norcia Mission team north of Perth in Western Australia. In a series of matches in Perth, the team lost only once in 18 games. A Christian historian of the era remarked: The Australian native takes kindly to any form of sport he may set his mind upon. His inclination to labour is not at all so keen. But if labour could be placed before him in the form of a game of some kind, he would be an undoubted success in the world. (Tatz, 1995: 57)


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Neither Salvado nor cricket prevailed after 1905: the Aborigines Act 1905 ended that freedom. The Chief Protector became the legal guardian of every Aborigine under 16 and he could remove people to and from reserves at whim. Liquor was forbidden. Fears about ‘racial mixing’ ensured that


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inter-racial marriage was banned, unless by written permission of the Protector. Children were forcibly removed from their parents and placed in so-called ‘assimilation homes’, ‘for their own good’. Queensland in 1897 and Western Australia in 1905 set the tone for the rest of the country. Rigid law was now the instrument of social control and much of settler animus and prejudice were reflected in the statutes and draconian regulations. In the West, Aborigines could be punished for refusing to work, being cheeky, not emptying laundry tubs, leaving taps running, not parking the horse and dray and being untidy. In Queensland they could be imprisoned by officials and missionaries, for three weeks at a time on each ‘charge’, for refusing to work, committing adultery, playing cards, setting fire to the women’s jail, and refusing to give a faeces sample to the visiting doctor. How did they play sport amidst all this? With difficulty. Koonibba, in the far west of South Australia, began as a Lutheran mission in 1897 and has had a successful Australian Rules football team since 1906, winning close on two dozen premierships. In the 1950s, with too many Aborigines wanting to play, a sister team, Rovers, was admitted to the league, and within a year had won the 1958 premiership. We are constantly reminded of the gap between black and white male life expectancy. Rovers presents a hardly unique reality: of the 18 men in that winning team, only one was alive in 1987 – the other 17 men didn’t make it to the age of 50. The Northern Territory is perhaps the measure of ambiguity. Settlement began as a tiny colonial outpost in Palmerston, now Darwin, with a few hundred pith-helmeted, boozy bearers of the Imperial message about civilisation and ‘the white man’s burden’, men who saw themselves as ‘practical bushmen’, men ever eager to give the natives ‘lessons in gunpowder’. Horseracing was the great sport, from which blacks were excluded, except as grooms, stable hands and jockeys in the ‘blackboys’ races that were always a postscript to the day’s outings. Australian Rules football came to the Territory in 1916 and from then, to this day, it became the all-consuming sport. Astonishingly, two ‘halfcastes’ were there at the birth and became not only football champions, but champion cricketers, athletes, swimmers, soccer players and rifle shooters. Reuben Cooper and Willie Allen each had a white father and a tribal Aboriginal mother. Both broke through the colour bars because of the status (and protection) of their fathers, and both became leaders in several fields. Allen served in Egypt and Palestine during World War I even though Aborigines were exempt from military service [because they were deemed unreliable]. Cooper protested at the kind of racism which led to white teams refusing to play under ‘coloured’ referees and all ‘non-white’ players being banned between 1926 and 1929. St Mary’s football team was the watershed. In the 1940s and early 1950s, many young men from the Tiwi Islands (Bathurst and Melville) came to Darwin for three-month spells to work for the Army and Air Force. Despite




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the uniforms, they were not allowed to be servicemen and worked essentially as domestic servants. The Bishop of Darwin felt that football might be ‘a good thing’ for the men, and despite the town’s administrators not wanting ‘too many blackfellas around’, the team was born in 1952. In 1954–55 they won the first of many premierships, and a total of 26 Northern Territory Football League (NTFL) flags by the end of the 2007–08 season. The Tiwi Bombers were admitted as the eighth team in the senior NTFL competition for the 2007–08 season. Queensland remains the ‘problem child’ of Australian race relations. The protection Act of 1897 saved at least half of the Aboriginal clans from massacre and the opium trade, but the legacies of racial hatred and contempt remained. The legislation enabled full control of Aborigines and included, as most such laws did, a provision for exemption, the certificate of which basically indicated that the holders were, in effect, ‘white folks’. Meston was the first Protector, and although a sports lover, he hated cricket. Walter Roth, his successor, disliked all sport and insisted on stopping it: the pedestrians (‘peds’) make ‘plenty of money for a few years on behalf of the betting fraternity ... come back to us wrecks, as a rule, and a nuisance and a burden upon the rest’ (Tatz 1995: 89). He banned all peds from earning their living by the strategy of prosecuting trainers for coaching them and race promoters for ‘harbouring’ them. Jerry Jerome’s exemption certificate enabled his long and popular career as a middleweight boxer. Roth loathed and hounded him, accusing ‘this moneyed gentleman’ of ‘inciting Aborigines to refuse to work unless paid cash for it’ at Taroom Settlement. The authorities got their man: when his boxing ended, they shipped him to Cherbourg Settlement, took his earnings, and there he died, penniless. Ron Richards, possibly the best of all Australian boxers, hailed from Deebing Creek. In his career, exploited as most Aboriginal boxers were, he twice beat Gus Lesnevitch, considered one of the greatest light-heavyweight champions of the twentieth century. He lost twice to the legendary Archie Moore. But if not for his exemption certificate, there would have been no place for him in history. Jerome was the forerunner of Richards, and Richards led the way for what seemed like an avalanche of Aboriginal champions from the ‘Sunshine State’: Elley Bennett, bantamweight champion of Australia; George Bracken, twice lightweight champion; Gary Cowburn, welterweight and junior welterweight champion; Jack Hassen, lightweight champion; and Robert Peden, bantamweight champion. An all-time record was created at the Commonwealth Games in 1962: in Australia’s amateur boxing team of eight, three men – Jeff Dynevor, Eddie Barney [Eddie Gilbert’s son] and Adrian Blair – came from Cherbourg, with a population of just on a thousand. All three were ‘controlled’ Aborigines, needing dispensation to leave the reserve and fight in Perth. (Dynevor won the bantamweight gold.)


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There were several unusual and unexpected stories. In 1893, Frank Ivory – ‘a half-caste from Maryborough’ – played rugby union for Queensland against New South Wales. Women’s cricket began in 1929, basically as a ‘silvertail’ (upper-class) game, yet when an English team arrived on tour in 1934, two very poor-end-of-town black first cousins, Edna Crouch and Mabel Campbell, were picked for Queensland. Eddie Gilbert, who once famously bowled Don Bradman for a duck and who Bradman said was the fastest bowler he had ever faced, was a Cherbourg man who played for Queensland between 1930 and 1935. ‘Controlled’, he travelled to matches by train, while his team mates went together by car. Forever chaperoned lest he got too close to white ladies, he needed permission to play in each match. When his services were no longer needed, the Queensland Cricket Association didn’t send the notice to him but to his ‘guardian’, the settlement manager, with the request that the cricket clothing issued to Eddie be laundered and returned to headquarters in Brisbane. Nevertheless, he did play Sheffield Shield cricket for six years. By the early 1970s, things were beginning to change across black Australia. Most states abolished their restrictive statutes, except Queensland, which followed suit in the mid-1980s. Rugby league was the major sport. Beginning with Lionel Morgan playing for Australia in 1962, an assembly line of stellar Queensland players emerged, especially in the ferocious State of Origin matches against New South Wales, which began in 1980. Each is now a ‘star’, a hero, well-paid, carefully nurtured and managed, extravagantly paraded poster boys for all manner of commercial and public relations exercises intended to suggest level playing fields. More than any other sport, Queensland rugby league illustrates the dialectical contradictions of denigration and adulation, vilification and adoration, omission and selection.

The sport of exclusion Queensland passed its [genocide] Protection Act in 1897 and the other states soon followed. Restrictive laws prevented Aboriginal participation in virtually every economic activity, confining them to isolated mission stations and reserves for ‘their own protection’. The Queensland Amateur Athletics Association tried to disbar all Aborigines on the spurious grounds that they either ‘lacked moral character’, ‘had insufficient intelligence’ or ‘couldn’t resist white vice’. These appalling excuses were rejected by the national athletics body, leading to the Queensland Association deeming them all professionals in 1903. In 1896, the Northern Territory settlers, small in numbers, ordained that ‘no aborigines or other coloured races be allowed to compete in European events’ – a response to the £10 Pine Creek Handicap victory in 1895 of an Aborigine named, unsurprisingly, Bismarck. Racial exclusion doesn’t have to be an overt act; omission is effective enough. The original Victorian Football League (VFL, renamed the AFL in




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1990) began in 1897. One can find only two Aboriginal names between the 1890s and the 1920s, and ten players from the start until the league’s 75th anniversary in 1962. Aborigines certainly had the strength, speed or reaction skills needed for this game: their prowess in cricket, boxing and especially professional athletics had been well demonstrated between the 1860s and the 1960s. This fast running, handling, kicking game on a large field seemed a ‘natural’ for sports-minded Aborigines. The trickle began in the 1950s but there were as few as 20 top players in the first 80 years of the competition. The (relative) flood of Aboriginal players began in the 1980s, with six to seven times that earlier number emerging in the next 20 years. There is now an over-representation of Aboriginal players: Aborigines form 2.6 % of the population (517,000 people) yet they now comprise between 13 and 14 % of the senior players in AFL (with the same disproportion in rugby league). Sport exclusion led to bizarre situations. In the 1920s, Leo Appo, a champion axeman, couldn’t get a place at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. Encouraged to call himself a New Zealander, he gained entry and won several events before announcing his Aboriginality. To gain bouts, several mainline boxers became ‘Greek’. Percy Hobson, chosen for the high jump at the 1962 Commonwealth Games, was told by athletics officials to ‘play down’ his Aboriginal origins. Frankie Reys, winner of the 1973 Melbourne Cup, said horseracing was so racist that he called himself a Filipino (which he was, in part), and in that identity he became president of the Victorian Jockeys’ Association for ten years. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, several Australian Rules players and rugby league champions also ‘suppressed’, or were suppressed, but ‘found’ their Aboriginal origins on retirement. Pre- and post-war Aboriginal teams in Australian Rules and in rugby league have been refused admission or been expelled from various leagues. The Tweed Heads All-Blacks rugby league team arose solely as a result of Aboriginal exclusion from white teams in 1930. Efforts ‘to admit the dusky athletes to the white fold’ in 1931 failed, ‘the Noes having it by 17 votes to 15, with the result that the whites will have to struggle on as best they can’ (Tatz, 1995: 196). The famous Cherbourg Settlement teams of the 1920s and 1930s won many local league trophies in southern Queensland. Frank Fisher, grandfather of champion athlete Cathy Freeman, was a central figure in their successes. Invited to play professionally in England, the Aboriginal administration refused him permission to apply for a passport, claiming that one star from Cherbourg, Edie Gilbert, was enough. The Redfern All-Blacks rugby league team was the focus of a strong sense of black identity in downtown Sydney, an urban society into which Aborigines, especially the rural ‘half-castes’, were meant to be assimilated to the point of their disappearance. The [then] Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs supported the team, keenly aware of the struggle to


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survive discrimination, exploitation, poverty and, foremost, the pressure to surrender their identity. Rugby league players in white teams in Armidale, NSW were forever sitting on the bench, not getting games and feeling unwanted. Amid loud cries of opposition from the town and the local university academics, they achieved an Aboriginal side in 1977. Narwan won the Caltex Shield and in 1980 the Clayton Cup, country league’s most prestigious event, then five premierships and four knockout competitions. As with so many other teams, Narwan was expelled from Group 19 in country competition in 2005, ostensibly for unpaid debts. The Gimbisi Warriors were ejected from Group 2 for ‘crowd behaviour’ and Northern United were refused entry to Group 1. The outstanding Moree Boomerangs began in the 1940s, disappeared, then resurfaced in the 1970s. They won the prestigious Group 4 grand final in 1982 and again in 1992. As the last century ended, the Boomerangs were excluded from the competition. Such exclusion has occurred in every state in the last three decades. Reasons vary from bad fan behaviour, to assaulting referees, unpaid dues and, in a land of excessive oaths and imprecations, excessive bad language. The latest saga has been the attempt to create a 14-team competition called the Nations Aboriginal Rugby League in rural New South Wales. Why there is so much opposition, especially from Country Rugby League, is not clear: strong assimilationist thrusts are still evident in Australian public life, or it could be that football administrators don’t want to lose the many Aboriginal champions who now play for senior city teams. The concept of a separate development, of ‘All Blacks’, is alive and well; Aborigines have shown, especially through the NSW Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout carnival, that they can run their own competitions, given a little breathing space and a ground to play on; and, significantly, the people of towns like Toomelah, Taree, Kempsey, Newcastle, Bourke, Walgett and Moree now see themselves as Aboriginal nations. Following a 2008 World Cup curtain-raiser between an ‘Indigenous Dreamtime’ team and a New Zealand Maori team, a clamour began for both to be included officially in the next World Cup in 2013. Pressure will mount for an Aboriginal team’s inclusion, but reaching that goal will depend on the willingness of the national team to forego Aboriginal players. It will also require a willingness to understand that Aboriginal culture is not solely about corroborees, body-painting and dancing, but is also very much about kinship, family and social ties that are enhanced by playing games together.



Appropriation, adulation and intervention Evonne Goolagong-Cawley and Cathy Freeman are national treasures and both are adored internationally. Cathy adorns covers of books and


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magazines and she remains probably the most photographed sportsperson in Australia. Cathy’s breaking through makes her a convenient ‘sample of one’ – the attractive, sunny former world 400m track champion whose very agreeable presence on centre stage ‘proved’ that Australians are not racist. She was always well aware of this readiness to embrace her, to appropriate her as though she has single-handedly transformed the whole Aboriginal experience into the opposite of what it really is. There may well be neither malice nor ulterior motive in this taking over of Cathy, but her success is still portrayed, or sometimes interpreted, as proof of the (allegedly) vast improvements in Aboriginal life. Evonne and Cathy are, in effect, aberrations – their careers and their chosen sports are not the norm for Aboriginal or Islander women. Amid much sporting euphoria, the Howard Coalition federal government launched an ‘emergency intervention’ in the Northern Territory in 2007, sending in civilian task forces (largely untrained in this work), and the military (even less qualified) ‘to save the children’ from reported neglect, child abuse and sexual molestation. Kevin Rudd’s Labor government has continued the programme for at least another three years. The intervention involves the suspension (and therefore the protections) of the federal Racial Discrimination Act and the Northern Territory’s anti-discrimination legislation; the suspension of the permit system which allows Aborigines to decide who can enter their domains; the search for sexual predators, with only 17 convictions in the first 18 months of operation; the quarantining of all social welfare payments; the physical medical examination of children; the banning of alcohol and police raids on houses in search of yeast (lest they brew at home); the arresting of youths for under age but consensual sex; and the exacting of rentals for Spinifex-grass ‘humpies’ and corrugated lean-to dwellings (to teach them the value of property). It affects some 82 communities and 47 town camps. A Meston-like quality permeates this ‘save-the-children’ intervention. There are some positive outcomes to date, notably the reduction of alcoholfuelled male pressures on women to hand over their food money. But it must be said that not very much has changed since Meston pushed for such protections 114 years ago. There is still a governmental philosophy of blanket ascription: any instance of deviant behaviour by an individual, a group or a community is considered the behaviour of all Aborigines, and all must surrender to a national or state ‘remedy’. Many Aborigines are back to where special legislation began a century ago, but this time round there are no exemption certificates.


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The challenges How then do men and women go about the business of playing sport? Whether there is intervention of this military, and very old-fashioned, kind,


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or whether communities attempt living under their own rules, the daily lives of those in remote and rural Australia are not normal in a first-world nation. Sporting success has not ended short life-spans, gross ill-health, lack of housing and sanitation, massive unemployment, less than adequate education, social breakdown in many communities, and a devastating youth suicide rate so indicative of purposelessness. Within these widespread and often shocking conditions of life, sport is not merely a luxury or a leisure activity at the end of an arduous working week. For youth in many communities, it enables a sense of membership and a feeling of coherence. Sport is more important to them than it is to any other segment of Australian society. It lessens delinquency and, in an era in which suicide rates are grossly abnormal, it gives youth a sense of belonging, something to stand for. Even if sport does not actually prevent suicide, it clearly defers that action, often allowing a time-out period to reconsider life’s chances (Tatz, 2007). It offers a chance for a period of wellness. It is a powerful weapon in the fight against rampant diabetes; and many of today’s illnesses, especially of the cardiac, renal and respiratory systems, are better controlled by physical regimens, including sporting competition. In many ways sport is survival: it provides purpose in life, an activity of real meaning, a reason for being, a sense of power and empowerment, and a feeling of autonomy, however brief. Because of their place in the political, legal, economic and social system, Aborigines and Islanders rarely if ever get onto squash courts or championship golf courses or into ski lodges. They don’t hang-glide, play polo, sail yachts, ride bikes for Yamaha or drive cars for Ferrari. On remote or rural reserves, where most Aborigines have lived, there was and is no grass, no facilities, coaches, nutritionists, physiotherapists, personal trainers, motivators, let alone floodlights or change-rooms. Scholarship money is rare. Even then, transfer to sports institutes down south has strong side effects: most Aborigines dislike leaving home, let alone relocating to another state. Increased access may result when (if ever) health bureaucrats recognise the role of sport. The initiative will not come from them, but rather from the pressure exerted by Aboriginal champions who have both the respect and the capacity to raise a strong political voice about community sporting needs. When the land rights era began in the 1970s, some Aboriginal communities realised that the political system had yielded very little, and that recourse to law was a more promising avenue for the discovery, and recovery, of rights. In the 1990s, a few Aboriginal athletes began to take legal paths to confront an endemic racism that many sports officials still see as normal or, if not quite normal, then simply as part of the game. Footballers Michael Long and Anthony Mundine refused to buckle to the mantras that ‘boys will be boys’ and that ‘what happens on the field should stay on the field’. In the 1990s they pursued instances of gross abuse, and won. Clubs




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have begun to see that some behaviours are now not just ‘a little off’ but clearly lack legitimacy. Some frightful anti-female behaviour, especially among rugby league players, has coincided with a sharp focus on the onfield and off-field racism. Illegitimacy is at least a prelude to illegality. That is the challenge: to push a prejudice-ridden society, such as Australia, to the point where it responds to overt racism, in its various forms, with overt sanctions rather than hush-hush therapy, where it deals with overt racism as a form of criminality rather than as an illness treatable by counselling or ‘curable’ by one or two educational seminars. History alone shows the depth and pervasiveness of the racial problem (in Australia and elsewhere). The racism identified in this brief historical analysis is hardly superficial, recent, or treatable with an external unguent or band-aid. It isn’t an illness, but if we do succumb to a medical metaphor then we would have to say that some of it is acne, some angina, some anthrax, some atherosclerosis – and one prescription can’t possibly address all four. Penalty and punishment will suit some racist circumstances, strong pressure group politics another, criminal prosecution or civil law action yet another. Educational therapy as a way of eliminating prejudice, the mindset that makes people think ill of others without sufficient warrant, has yet to provide any evidence of efficacy, let alone eradication.

Note 1. The most famous and richest of all professional races, the Stawell Easter Gift in Victoria, was won by Aboriginal runners in 1883 (Bobby Kinnear), 1910 (Tom Dancey), 1929 (Lynch Cooper) and again in 2005 and 2006 (Joshua Ross).


114 Colin Tatz


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Part III


Identities


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Natural-Born Athletes? Australian Aboriginal People and the DoubleEdged Lure of Professional Sport Daryl Adair and Megan Stronach

In contemporary Australia, Indigenous people feature as highly respected performers in the mainstream sports of boxing, athletics, Australian Rules football and rugby league. Many of them are now both sports stars and celebrities, such as Olympic gold medallist Cathy Freeman, whom Colin Tatz describes fondly as a ‘national treasure’ (Tatz, Chapter 7). Widespread public appreciation of Indigenous athletes is, however, a quite recent phenomenon. As Tatz explains, Australian sport history has been riven by laws, rules and customs that have excluded, marginalised or at best complicated Aboriginal involvement in white-organised sport. The contemporary adulation of Indigenous athletes should, therefore, be balanced by an awareness about long term disregard, disrespect and dishonesty in the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australian sport. That complex story has been related by others (such as Tatz, 1995a, 2009; Nielsen, 2009; Sampson, 2009a; Stephen, 2009) and will be dealt with only briefly here. The prime purpose of this chapter is to consider the public prominence of Indigenous Australian athletes in the early twenty-first century, and to evaluate ideas that ‘explain’ their sporting prowess. As will be shown, a key to all this is the assumption that Australian Aboriginal people have a ‘natural’ proficiency for athletic sports; it is something they are said to be ‘born with’. There are, we argue, reasons to be doubtful about claims to innate physical acumen – even more so when they are, as is sometimes the case, couched in ‘racial’ terms.

Past and present, same and different


8

Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the Indigenous peoples of Australia, have societies and cultures that extend over 40,000 years. From the late eighteenth century, however, their traditional way of life was slowly eroded by the impact of European settlement, and accelerated during the nineteenth 117


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century by the imposition of colonial laws and practices that subjugated and ostracised the original inhabitants. By the turn of the twentieth century it was widely presumed, at least among whites, that Aborigines were a ‘dying race’. Indigenous Australians nonetheless survived against great odds, such as their lack of immunity to European diseases, loss of traditional hunting territories, and state-sanctioned policies allowing the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents and permanent relocation with white families (Rowley, 1970; Reynolds, 2008). In the twenty-first century, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, once the sole custodians of the Australian continent, constitute less than 3% of the national population. The pernicious legacy of colonialism remains with Indigenous disadvantage evident across virtually every socio-economic indicator. Aboriginal people have, for example, significantly lower life expectancy than other Australians,1 much higher levels of unemployment,2 considerably lower levels of education and income,3 and are vastly over-represented in the nation’s prisons.4 On 13 February 2008 the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, issued a national apology to victims of the Stolen Generations; this was an expression of regret at the pain and suffering caused by the twentieth-century practice of forced relocation of many Aboriginal children with non-Aboriginal families (Rudd, 2008). The apology was also about progress towards another goal: reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This was only possible, argued pundits, by recognising past failings and then moving towards regeneration (Mellor et al., 2007). Since 2007, however, both the Howard conservative government and its successor the Rudd Labor government have been engaged in what critics label (among other things) ‘coercive reconciliation’ (Altman and Hinkson, 2007). In remote areas of the Northern Territory, reports of Aboriginal alcoholism, domestic violence and the sexual abuse of children provided a rationale for Commonwealth governments to intervene, literally, and thus micro-manage Indigenous communities they deemed to be chronically dysfunctional. This state paternalism, which continues in 2010, has been praised or damned across the political spectrum (Johns, 2008; Toohey, 2008), with major disagreements also among Indigenous leaders, some of whom defend the Aboriginal right to autonomy, while others view state intervention as an appropriate response to an ‘emergency’ (Maddison, 2008). In summary, Indigenous people have a multitude of reasons for feeling disenchanted by and disengaged from Australian society, past and present.

Indigenous sports stars


118 Daryl Adair and Megan Stronach

Compared to all of the above, a few key areas of professional sport appear to be a ‘good news’ story for Aboriginal people (Adair, 2006: 69). In recent years they have been statistically over-represented as contracted players in the two major football codes – Australian Rules (AFL) and rugby league (NRL) – with


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ratios of around 10%, far exceeding the 2.6% of Indigenous people in the most recent Australian census (AFL, 2007; Masters, 2009). This has been a great source of pride to the wider and diverse Aboriginal community, with dedicated newspapers like the Koori Mail and the National Indigenous Times devoting much of their sport sections to the feats of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players in the AFL and the NRL. Similarly, the National Indigenous Television Service (NITV) – available on both free-to-air and subscription services since July 2007 – features the very popular Indigenous programs Marngrook and Barefoot Rugby League, which are devoted to discussions about ‘footy’ and ‘league’ respectively.5 The other two sports to feature many elite Indigenous athletes are boxing and athletics. Prize fighting in Australia has long involved Aboriginal pugilists; perhaps the key difference today is that they are much better paid and have more control over their careers. Richard Broome has gauged that between 1912 and 1980 some 15% of Australian boxing titles went to Aboriginal fighters (Broome, 1980: 53). Indigenous boxers have also shone abroad, with Commonwealth or world titles from Dave Sands (1940s), Lionel Rose (1968), Anthony Mundine (2001–2009), Daniel Geale (2004) and Robert Peden (2005). Turning to athletics, female runner Cathy Freeman – a world title holder and gold medallist – not only flies the flag for Aboriginal people, but for their women. While she has clearly been the most successful Indigenous athlete in recent Australian history, Aboriginal runners (particularly sprinters) have a long tradition of outstanding performances dating back to the nineteenth century (Broome, 1995; Tatz, 1995b). Today the likes of Joshua Ross (Stawell Gift winner, 2003, 2005) and Patrick Johnson (a personal best of 9.93 seconds for the 100m) provide stellar examples of speed and grace under pressure. In summary, ‘footy’, league, boxing and athletics are arenas in which Indigenous performers now often star. However, as mentioned previously, this rise to prominence has occurred despite a long history of Aboriginal marginalisation from Australian sport, and discrimination once within it. Not until the mid 1990s, and after considerable struggle, did Indigenous professional athletes persuade sport authorities to introduce antivilification legislation on playing fields that were, after all, also their place of work (Gardiner 1997, 2002; Warren and Tsaousis, 1997; Wright, 1999; Godwell, 2000; McNamara, 2000; Gorman, 2004; McNeill, 2008; Hallinan and Judd, 2009). Overt racism has diminished, to a considerable degree, because of the threat of penalties against on-field transgressors; though, as researchers point out, covert racism (beyond the referee’s whistle) is still experienced by some Aboriginal athletes (Oliver, 2006; Campbell, 2008;). Moreover, these measures are limited in their focus on players, not spectators (McNamara, 1998, 2001), and it was the latter who were the cause of Nicky Winmar’s defiant and now famous gesture of pride in his black skin during an AFL match in 1993 (Klugman and Osmond, 2009).


Natural-Born Athletes?


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Indigenous professional athletes ply their trade in cities; for those who relocate from rural or remote regions this can present significant challenges of adjustment to new spatial and cultural environments. Emma Campbell has interviewed Aboriginal footballers who took this journey in Australian Rules football. She concludes that the AFL has done a very good job of locating Indigenous talent, and has taken time to both recognise and accommodate the special needs of Aboriginal people relocated far from families and childhood friends (Campbell, 2008). This is, indeed, still a work in progress. There is also the problem, for Indigenous athletes, of professional sport bodies facilitating career transition and retirement from sport. Organisations like the Australian Institute of Sport, the AFL and the NRL have mainstream programmes, but none are yet designed to accommodate the needs of cohorts outside the homogenised ‘norm’. Megan Stronach’s ongoing Doctoral research is revealing that Aboriginal athletes making the transition from sport are typically unprepared to cope with drastic change: they usually have powerful familial links and kinship obligations, but typically modest levels of education and work experience. Most are uncertain about life beyond sport, their sense of self being bound up profoundly in physical capital. For example, Stronach interviewed fourteen boxers, eight of whom intimated that they would seek to work as physical trainers once they could no longer fight. They did not see a future for themselves outside sport (Stronach and Adair, 2010). Tatz (Chapter 7) has pointed to ‘monumental contradictions’ in the adulation by non-Indigenous Australians for so many Aboriginal stars of sport. The affection is genuine, but most fans have little knowledge about where these players come from, or the nature of their lives before coming to prominence as boxers, runners or footballers. It can be all too easy – indeed convenient – for non-Aboriginal people to look to these athletes as examples of rising Indigenous circumstances generally. But it is hopelessly naive to imagine that deep-seated structural inequalities will be affected in a substantive way by the individual successes of one hundred or so elite Aboriginal athletes (Coram, 1999). Yet fantasies about such a connection exist, particularly when associated with simplistic ideas about ‘opportunity for all’. The more that non-Indigenous Australians cheer for Aboriginal athletes, the more they can lay claim to championing Aboriginal advancement and ‘fighting’ racism (Bruce and Hallinan, 2001). Of course, some Australians do not fit this mindset at all. Toni Bruce, in a study of letters to the editor of newspapers during the Sydney 2000 Olympics, found numerous examples of correspondents vehemently opposed to the notion that gold medallist Cathy Freeman somehow embodied the Australian nation. Several of these writers raged against what they saw as the ‘political correctness’ of having an Aboriginal person light the flame at the opening ceremony of the Games (Bruce and Wensing, 2009).




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The context of Tatz’s observations in this volume about the importance of sport to Aboriginal youth comes from his discussion of how sport helps to alleviate suicidal thoughts and feelings among Indigenous youth (Tatz, 2007). Beyond that, the significance of local sport to Indigenous Australians has been demonstrated in various historical, biographical and community studies (Tatz, 1995b; Gorman, 2004; Hayward, 2006). In rural and remote areas, as well as the islands of the Torres Strait, sport appears to have a particular resonance, as suggested by the remark of an Aboriginal Tiwi Islander: ‘For the Tiwi people football means hope, it means pride and most of all it means life’. (Moodie, 2008). So football, not so much sport in general, is the focus here. Indeed, because of economic pressures and lack of social capital, Indigenous people tend to play a fairly narrow range of sports – those highlighted in this chapter. There have been relatively few opportunities for Aboriginal people to take part in expensive and socially elite sports like golf, sailing, rowing and aeronautics (Tatz, 1995b). Despite restrictions like this, Hallinan and Judd (2009: 1222) have contended that Indigenous people take part in sport at rates far above those of Australians in general. In making this judgment they admit to drawing upon a rather inconclusive data set. A more cautionary approach might have been taken in light of a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report which concluded that ‘while there is a plethora of information available on the general number and characteristics of Australian people who participate in sport and recreational activities (including age, gender, frequency and type of participation), very little data focuses on the ethnic or cultural background of participants’ (Oliver, 2006: 19). This study noted that ‘while many sporting organisations have dedicated Indigenous sporting programmes, some have yet to develop specific initiatives to promote Indigenous participation in sport’ (Oliver, 2006: 20). The report also emphasised that ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are ... not represented proportionally in sporting organisations, and very few have represented at the elite and national level’ (Oliver, 2006: 19). At a tangent to sport involvement is the question of physical activity and, in the current context, Indigenous participation. The Better Health Channel (BHC), an online information resource assured by the Victorian state government, admits that while there is a small range of reliable figures, ‘in general, Indigenous Australians are less physically active than the rest of the population’ (BHC, 2009). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), meanwhile, has reported that ‘physical inactivity was the third leading cause of the burden of illness and disease for Indigenous Australians in 2003, accounting for 8% of the total burden and 12% of all deaths’ (ABS, 2008). The same report concluded that ‘after adjusting for


Aboriginal sport participation


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differences in the age structure between the two populations, Indigenous Australians were more likely than non-Indigenous Australians to be sedentary or to exercise at low levels’ (ABS, 2008). In short, it is difficult to make a case – statistically – that the playing of sport or engagement in physical activity has more resonance for Aboriginal people than for other Australians. Yet among Indigenous people there appear to be differences according to region: ABS figures for 2002 indicate that Aboriginal people in remote areas were more likely to take part in sport than those in urban areas (ABS, 2005c).6 A difficulty in making assessments like this, however, is that ABS statistics about Indigenous sport and physical activity are a work in progress; there is so much data to be gathered and evaluated. Beyond the realm of numbers a cautionary perspective has already been put forward by Nelson, whose qualitative research on sport and physical activity among urban Aboriginal youth was prompted by her goal of raising questions and challenging assumptions about Indigenous physicality, ‘particularly the essentialist notion that all Indigenous children both like sport and are good at sport’ (Nelson, 2009: 102 – emphasis in the original). From interviewing urban Aboriginal youth, she concluded that: [these] young people did not produce a neat, essentialised view of sport in their lives. There was often complexity and contradiction within and between participants’ comments. There was also diversity in the ways in which they attributed meaning to sport in their lives. Sport seems to provide a positive influence for some regarding their health and identity. However, for others, sport played little or no positive role in their dayto-day lives. In a similar vein, Kickett-Tucker makes the salient point that although ‘sport remains a site of recognition and power’ for many Aboriginal youth, such as for those who do not identify with classroom education, competitive games contribute to the disempowerment of Aboriginal youth who are not good at sport (Kickett-Tucker, 1997). More research is therefore needed to test the assumption that Indigenous people are sport-active. Such inquiries ought to be sensitive to a range of differences such as region, education, gender and income. As Oliver concludes: Without reliable information about who is playing what sports in Australia – and why those sports are or are not attracting Indigenous or CALD [culturally and linguistically diverse] participants – it is difficult to determine what specific programmes need to be developed to increase the participation rates of different groups. Sporting organisations need to make this data collection a priority. (Oliver, 2006: 19)




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Godwell (1997, 2000) has made the argument that, as John Hoberman (1997) had observed about the United States, sport may not be an inherently positive force for improving Australian race relations. Godwell made five telling points. First, his interviews of Aborigines in elite rugby league uncovered persistent racism, something that Hallinan had also observed when researching what he termed the ‘positional segregation’ of Aboriginal players in the Australian game (Hallinan, 1991). Second, like Hoberman, Godwell concluded that professional sport is not a realistic career path for the overwhelming majority of Indigenous Australians (or, he might have added, for Australians generally). Scoring tries on the red dust of outback Queensland was the Aboriginal equivalent of ‘hoop dreams’ basketball in urban America. This was a boyhood dream of professional sport that very few could actually realise. Third, Godwell railed against beliefs that ascribed to Indigenous people innate, natural or genetically inherited physical abilities that ‘predisposed’ them, as a group, to be good at sport. He noted that this had been popularised by media superlatives for Aboriginal players, with descriptors like ‘black magic’, which in recent times has been supplemented by new rhetoric, such as ‘wizardry’. Fourth, Godwell noted that a belief in ‘genetic advantage’ for Aborigines in sport was ‘held by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike’. The implication, therefore, was that Aborigines had biologically inherited athletic giftedness, and that this natural advantage over non-Aborigines had been internalised and accepted to the point where it had become conventional wisdom. Unlike in the United States, though, Australian sport scientists were yet to firmly fixate on the biological ‘specimen’ of the ‘black athlete’, something that Hoberman (1997) has dismantled as illogical, stereotypical and counterproductive to African– American advancement in other spheres of life. Fifth, Godwell argued that beliefs about the collective, biologically-driven predisposition of Indigenous people to athletic prowess ‘should not be accepted without critical examination’ (2000: 13), and he made a contentious point: that the ‘natural’ Aboriginal athlete was a form of ‘racist social myth’ (2000: 19) which ought to be critiqued by Indigenous opinion leaders. This is because, he insisted, racial stereotypes have the effect – intended or otherwise – of limiting the range of life and career possibilities thought ‘available’ to Aboriginal people (2000: 17). Godwell concluded that ‘Aborigines run the risk of being typecast in life as sportspeople’ (2000: 16). A position like this had been held previously by scholars in other parts of the world, where ethnic ‘minorities’ or ‘people of colour’ have reached great heights in elite-level sport but were significantly less represented, in career terms, within non-sport professional settings (for example, Wiggins, 1989; Hoberman, 1997; St Louis, 2003). In late twentieth-century Australia, however, Godwell’s perspective on sport and Indigenous people seemed iconoclastic.


Performing and interpreting Aboriginality in sport


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In the early twenty-first century, Australian researchers of sport, ‘race’ and Aboriginality have focused mainly on the discursive construction and impact of inferential racism (Coram, 2007; Hallinan and Judd, 2009). For example, through the work of the media, stereotypes tend to be recognised by mainstream society as informative and representative, serving as an ‘othering’ mechanism between socially constructed dominant and subordinate groups (Hallinan et al., 2004; Tatz, 2009). In the context of Australian sport, these descriptions sometimes insinuate that in order to be successful, Indigenous athletes do not need to work as hard, develop skills, or put in as much effort as non-Indigenous athletes. As Ramsey (1998: 87) has put it: There remains a school of thought that Aboriginal footballers are not the same as other players, that they process a kind of ‘sixth sense’ that allows them a greater awareness of what’s happening around them, an ability to size up pressure situations more quickly than their fair-skinned opponents and that they have an added athleticism that makes the most difficult physical tasks seem easier. However, this disregards the training, skill development, strength and conditioning and psychological drives that are crucial for all athletes to compete and succeed at elite levels of sport. Speaking at a forum that discussed how Indigenous Australians have enriched Australian Rules football, retired Aboriginal player Che Cockatoo-Collins remarked: So you’ll get people, you’ll get commentators using language like, ‘Oh, this is magic.’ So almost in a mythical sense. Which really irritates us [Indigenous] players, because what it does is saying to everyone else that somehow this is done a lot easier, and so we don’t work as hard. (Cockatoo-Collins et al., 2009) Non-Indigenous commentators have indeed been awestruck by some of the athletic feats of Aboriginal footballers, offering plaudits like ‘freak goals’ and ‘eyes in the back of their head’ (Hallinan et al., 2004, 2005; Coram, 2007; Tatz, 2009). However, this is hardly restricted to non-Aboriginal observers. For example, when the National Indigenous Times reported on the inaugural rugby league match between the ‘Indigenous All Stars’ and the ‘NRL All Stars’, the headline read ‘Thurston magic clinches victory’ (18 February 2010). While all this adulation may be well-meant, and understandable when viewers are ensconced in the fast-moving drama of sport, an overemphasis on athletic acumen to the exclusion of other qualities may pose risks beyond the playing field. Hallinan and Judd, when interviewing AFL administrators, asked questions about the lack of Aboriginal staff in club administration, coaching and other off-field roles. They found that some respondents reverted to ‘racial logic’ to explain this disparity: Indigenous




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players, it was thought, had ‘natural’ physical prowess but were not suited to decision-making or positions of responsibility outside sport performance (Hallinan and Judd, 2009). In practice, therefore, this type of stereotyping ‘reduces people to a few, simple, essential, characteristics, which are represented as fixed by nature’ (Hall, 1997b: 257). In the American scholarly literature on sport and ‘race’, this has been described as the assumption of ‘black brawn vs white brains’ (Buffington and Fraley, 2008: 293), which has wider implications for racialised thinking. For example, an American survey of 600 white respondents ‘found that the more respondents endorsed genetic underpinnings for a perceived race difference in athleticism the greater their level of prejudice and negative stereotyping about Blacks’. The authors of this psychological study concluded that ‘the belief in a genetic race difference in athleticism may function to sustain racist ideologies by implying the inferiority of Blacks’ intelligence and work ethic’ in sport, and by extension, society (Sheldon et al., 2007: 31). However, critics of the ‘naturally gifted’ Aboriginal athlete have focused inordinately on non-Aboriginal typecasting of Indigenous performers. This has tended to overlook the prescient work of Godwell, who took the methodological initiative of interviewing Aboriginal professional athletes as part of his Masters thesis and, in the process, gathering data about Indigenous senses of self through sport (Godwell, 1997). This phenomenological approach has since been pursued by a handful of scholars, such as Gorman, whose biographical study of the Krakouer brothers was based on lengthy interviews with both of these retired Aboriginal footballers (Gorman, 2004, 2005). Similarly, Emma Campbell actively sought Indigenous voices to make sense of Aboriginal experiences of recruitment into the AFL. Chris Hallinan and Barry Judd, meanwhile, interviewed an all-Aboriginal basketball team from the Victorian country town of Ballarat in order to make sense of ‘race’ relations in local sport (Hallinan and Judd, 2007). Most recently, Stronach has interviewed more than thirty elite Indigenous athletes who have been part of the AFL, NRL or boxing. Her ongoing focus is with career transition and retirement experiences, which has involved respondents reflecting on their sense of self both during and after sport. In almost every case, and without prompting, the interviewees indicated what they described as a shared and common belief – that in sport Indigenous people are in fact naturally and genetically gifted, and as a group are therefore both ‘different’ and athletically ‘superior’ to their non-Indigenous counterparts. A typical example is Jerry, a retired professional boxer: ‘You know yourself, you can go anywhere in Australia, any school in Australia, the best athlete is what? The best sportsman is what? Aborigines! They’re gifted, high fighters, running, speed, more balance, rhythm, timing – they’re gifted.’ For Billy, the Aboriginal talent for boxing was also innate: ‘Yeah, it’s in blackfellas’ blood, to fight, all blackfellas are good fighters; they just need someone




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to bring it out of ’em’. No acknowledgement here of other motivations at work, such as the incredible will and desire of Indigenous fighters to excel in an ultra-competitive physical environment where, as with other minorities around the world, the boxing ring provided temporary opportunity for success. The space outside the ring has proved to be a more formidable challenge to non-white boxers in Australia and other parts of the world (Sugden, 1996). Steve, a former AFL player and coach, shares the idea of the ‘naturally gifted’ player, but goes further. Without realising it, Steve perpetuates another stereotype by unwittingly typecasting Indigenous footballers as inherently vulnerable to stress: The only ones that are really allowed to do their own things are the Indigenous players – that’s because they are natural players, they’ve just got a gift. Oh yeah, the Indigenous players are the natural players, they are, but you shouldn’t really put pressure on them because all of a sudden they realize they’re a long way from where they live and where they would like to be. You just need to get the best out of them, that’s all you need to do. Yet other evidence suggests that hard work and practice and a learned ability to thrive under pressure are the keys to Aboriginal excellence in sport. Gorman’s research into the Krakouer brothers is particularly apt in this regard: When I talked to Jimmy, I said ‘Tell me about the magic, Jimmy’ and he said, ‘What are you talking about, bro’ [brother]?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, how would you be able to find one another? You would have ten blokes around you and you would get the ball out and you’d handball off and plop it in Phillip’s hands and he would run off, how would that happen?’ He said, ‘We had the ball from the time we were three years old, when we could walk, and we’d go down to the park, we’d be constantly handballing and kicking, doing all these sorts of things; it was just confidence’. (Gorman, 2005) Similarly, Cyril Rioli, a diminutive figure in the AFL at only 177cm and 80kg, is renowned for his tackling prowess, which has led some commentators to wax lyrical about his Aboriginality (Cockatoo-Collins et al., 2009). However, when questioned by the media about this skill, which almost inevitably pits Rioli against a player with a larger frame, he emphasises that tackling is something he has worked on, and that he took up martial arts over two pre-seasons in order to improve his tackling technique and confidence in footy (McFarlane, 2009).




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I think it’s been passed on. And I mean when you look at a lot of the top athletes, they do have that look and physique of a natural-born warrior. And it’s something I think when you look at a lot of the sports that we do are handeye, speed, co-ordination, and that comes down I think to our ancestors and our fore-fathers. Alex thus acknowledged the importance of skills handed down from parents and the challenges of growing up in a remote environment, which in its own way necessitated athleticism if food was going to reach the camp fire. ‘Well’, he said, ‘the kangaroos didn’t jump in our laps!’. Stronach’s research suggests many have grown up ‘automatically’ aspiring to a career in professional sport, which was virtually a ‘given’ based on an assumed genetic trait, ‘racial’ predisposition, or familial link; from this mindset they became irretrievably linked to sport. Such beliefs and behaviours may appear ‘unconscious’, based on what has been described in another professional sport context as ‘unreflective routinisation’ (McGillivray and McIntosh, 2006). What emerges are ritualised cultural attitudes and behaviours in individuals, although the resulting conduct and practices tend to be absorbed unwittingly, or at least uncritically (McGillivray and McIntosh, 2006). Wacquant (1995: 88) has noted an obsessional tendency around aspirations of elite sport achievement among African–American boxers, describing a ‘non-thetic quasi- organismic commitment to the sport ... operating beneath the level of discourse and consciousness’.

Beyond the ‘Natural Athlete’? Tatz and Adair have remarked upon what seems obvious: that ‘sport profiles and accentuates the movement of bodies and interactions between them’, and that such ‘athletic bodies have varying shapes, sizes and capacities’ (2009: 3). However, they caution, ‘within those milieus of divergence there is an intriguing constant: the widespread assumption that skin colour (commonly but erroneously referred to as race) is a fundamental explanation for performance excellence (or failure)’ (2009: 3). In short, Tatz and Adair conclude, ‘there is a belief that skin colour predisposes people to have different athletic capacities’ (2003: 3). However, as Tatz has argued elsewhere (Tatz, 2009), ‘that notion grossly simplifies what is actually complex, for physicality is a combination of genetic attributes and environmental influences’ (Tatz and Adair, 2009: 3).


Returning to Stronach’s research, Alex, a retired NRL player, expressed a conviction about Aboriginal people as ‘natural’ athletes. But he also hinted at the importance of culture and the strength of familial example:


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Tatz and Adair attempt to challenge racialised thinking about physicality. They note that ‘Jack Nicklaus once made the naive statement that blacks were not good at golf because they had “different muscles” ... Enter Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh’ (Tatz and Adair, 2009: 3). ‘Just as foolish’, they argue, ‘was O.J. Simpson’s assertion that he had a natural biological advantage over white men on the football field’ (Tatz and Adair, 2009: 3). The authors conclude that ‘this racial typecasting is not only flawed, it has the effect of tending to pigeonhole by skin colour an individual’s physical capacities ... It is as incongruous as pseudo-scientific claims that some ‘races’ are born more intelligent than others’ (Tatz and Adair, 2009: 3). Moreover, the idea that ‘races’ actually exist is a fundamental contributor to why racism persists. Drawing upon Graves (2001), Adair (2009: v) concludes: there is no scientific basis for taxonomies of race; there are no human sub-species and thus people of any skin colour, climate, environment, culture and so on are capable of both mating and reproducing – thus adding to the genetic diversity and varied appearance of the one human species [emphasis in the original]. These pronouncements notwithstanding, the idea of the ‘natural’ athlete and, in the context of non-whites, biological, genetic and ‘racial’ explanations for innate sporting acumen are pervasive in popular culture, whether in Australia, the United States, Jamaica, or elsewhere. Godwell has made the vital observation that even if there is no scientific evidence to sustain folkloric theories that Aboriginal people, as a group, have ‘natural’ ability in sport, the fact of this belief has real world significance. His interviews with Indigenous rugby league players produced this key finding: there was ‘a strong link between these men believing in the existence of an innate athletic ability in Aborigines and their participation in sport’ (Godwell, 2000: 18). Godwell concluded that this showed the importance of believing, but not that there was substance to the belief itself. The circular nature of this problem was astutely observed by one of Godwell’s Indigenous respondents: I used to believe that all Kooris were good at sport. I don’t any more. I just think that Aboriginals believe that Aboriginals are the best sportspeople ... and believing in something makes a difference ... I always say believing is half way to getting somewhere. (Godwell, 2000: 18)



Self-belief is important for any athlete; it is something that coaches try to promote and psychologists instil. Sport teams, not just their constituent players, are said to need self-belief. It is no surprise, then, that self-belief is central to Godwell’s cohort. However, the nature of self-belief can be controversial. In 2008, Aboriginal football champion Adam Goodes, a dual


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Brownlow medallist and premiership player with the Sydney Swans, contributed a chapter on the Indigenous contribution to footy to the AFL’s official book commemorating the 150-year history of the Australian game (Slattery, 2008). In this essay Goodes remarked: ‘I know that when Aborigines play Australian football with a clear mind and total focus, [we] were born to play it’ (Munro, 2008). Sensationally, another contributor to The Australian Game of Football: Since 1858, the (non-Aboriginal) historian Gillian Hibbins, publicly attacked the Goodes view-point, suggesting that it was ‘racist’. She later clarified this label by stating: ‘If you define racism as believing a race is superior in something, this is basically what he (Goodes) was doing’ (Morrisey, 2008). Hibbins may have been feeling prickly after her own chapter had been criticised for summarily dismissing an Aboriginal connection to the origins of Australian Rules football (the Marngrook theory) as ‘a seductive myth’ (Munro, 2008). Again her choice of words seemed provocative and were a cause of disappointment to many. The National Indigenous Times reported two weeks later that Hibbins felt that her ‘comments were taken out of context, but on reflection ... her choice of wording may have been erroneous’. She emphasised: ‘I certainly do not believe that Adam Goodes is a racist ... I think he’s a fantastic footballer, and I’m sure he believes what he says – that Aboriginal footballers feel a brotherhood on the field and they feel a connection with the land’ (Munro, 2008). This was more than a clash about Aboriginal self-belief in playing footy; it went to the heart of a wider belief in who had invented the game of Australian Rules and whether Indigenous people had a role in that process (see Spike, 2009).

Indigenous wellbeing: in sport and beyond In the group of athletes interviewed by Stronach a strong sense of selfidentification with sport was evident when respondents completed the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS), a fairly standard psychological survey. This short questionnaire, developed by Brewer et al., (1993), features ten items encompassing social, cognitive, and affective elements of AI, and was administered to Indigenous athletes within the interview process. The AIMS items tap into the thoughts and feelings derived from athletes’ daily experiences. Scores on each item can range from 1 to 5; therefore the overall score may deviate from 10 to 50. Scores on this 10-item scale were averaged to give an indication of respondents’ overall level of AI. Athletes in Stronach’s study recorded relatively high measures on this scale (range 33–49, mean score 37.41), which were higher than scores reported by Fraser et al., (2008) (mean score 35.95) when they put the survey to athletes involved in the Athlete Career and Education Program (ACE), the sport career transition program delivered by the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) and associated institutions (AIS, 2009).




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Daryl Adair and Megan Stronach

Many researchers (Brewer et al., 1993; Lavallee et al., 1995,1997) have acknowledged advantages associated with a strong AI, in particular a determination to achieve athletic performance. A strong AI may also have longer lasting personal benefits for an athlete, such as a higher likelihood of long-term participation in exercise, with corresponding health and fitness benefits (Brewer et al., 1993). But there are also risks associated with AI. Athletes who place too much emphasis on sport to the exclusion of other identity factors are more likely to experience social and psychological difficulties during a sport cessation or transition period, such as being cut from a team, experiencing an injury, or retirement from their athletic careers (Brewer et al., 1993). Given that the Aboriginal athletes interviewed by Stronach are high on the AI scale, this reinforces the argument that career transition programmes need to move beyond mainstream concerns and also take into account the special socio-cultural circumstances of players, whether they be from Indigenous or CALD backgrounds. If, as is now widely accepted, Aboriginal recruits to professional sport, particularly those who move to cities from rural and remote areas, require culturally sensitive support it seems logical that they will also require culturally sensitive support for their post-sport career planning and preparation for life beyond professional sport. In this regard, retired Aboriginal AFL player Che Cockatoo-Collins (2009) pulls no punches, arguing that sport organisations have a key role to play: If you analyse the maturity chart for an organisation you’ll find that organisations who are serious about inclusive policy, they’ll have Aboriginal people in specific roles. I ask the question, where are those [AFL] coaches? Where are those board members? And by putting people in roles like that, I think you change the landscape. You change language and you’ll get people challenging, ‘Why did you say that? It’s not in the blood. What do you mean by saying that?’. Aboriginal athletic talent is in more demand than ever before. Talent scouts roam the country looking for the next champion boxer, sprinter or footballer. The Federal Government, via funding to the AIS, has helped to resource this process, providing A$8.8m (2006–2010) to specifically seek the recruitment of Indigenous sports talent (Magnay, 2006). By 2009, some 167 Aboriginal people were participating in the National Talent Identification and Development (NTID) programme, and there were efforts to engage more Indigenous coaches and officials in that process (NTID, 2009). While such national interest and support is widely welcomed among Aboriginal sport communities, it cannot be assumed that sufficient consideration has been given towards the structure of such programmes to meet the needs of young Indigenous athletes. For example, the NTID boxing programme – a joint initiative between BAI and the AIS, set up in 2007 – has attracted criticism


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In terms of indigenous athletes, I don’t think a lot of the support structures were well thought out and planned before we got there. It wasn’t a welcoming, warm, more inclusive place for young people being pulled from communities and that kind of stuff. Over the period of time that I was there, they ended up losing a lot of the athletes prematurely. If they had consulted at all with the Aboriginal community they might have been able to retain or have a closer link with family, which I don’t think they fully understood was quite important. So they ended up wasting a lot of funding as well. It’s about not knowing where you fit. Not knowing if you’re welcome here really or whether you’re just sort of here as a token. To add to that, the claim of racial slur by a senior AIS boxing official (Anderson, 2009) has confused and disheartened young Indigenous boxers, and suggests that much more work is needed on the cultural awareness training of coaches and administrators working with Aboriginal and CALD athletes. There have also been peculiar initiatives in the ‘hunt’ for Aboriginal athletic talent, such as the effort by Robert De Castella, an iconic former marathon champion, to lure Indigenous people into distance running on the assumption that there is something about black skin and/or Aboriginal genes that may allow them to compete, as Kenyans and Ethiopians have, over long athletic distances. De Castella, who is not Aboriginal, nonetheless has a dream of Aboriginal athletes taking part in the New York marathon, not with an expectation of winning, but with hopes of being competitive (7.30 Report, 2010). Like so many programmes to detect and lure ‘latent’ Aboriginal athletic talent, De Castella does not intend harm. But his vision of Indigenous Australians having similar genetic attributes for marathon running as East Africans is, frankly, fanciful, even delusional. And it is all the more surprising in that it comes from someone who based much of their own outstanding athletic career on a knowledge of sport science. Unwittingly, these various types of fascination with Aboriginal physicality reinforce the assumption that Indigenous people need to focus on their bodies, rather than their minds, in order to be successful. That is, of course, a problem not unique to Australia: there has been an almost voyeuristic focus on ‘brilliant’ black bodies (most recently in the case of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt), but a correspondingly patronising assumption that they have ‘fragile minds’ (St Louis, 2005). The inference is that they choose sport because that is what they can do ‘naturally’; and that they avoid academic and intellectual pursuits because these are things they are ‘not suited’ to in terms of ‘natural’ ability (Hoberman, 2000). This says nothing about the


from those it was meant to help. Jack explained that for some of the athletes, the programme is regarded merely as tokenism:


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structural and cultural factors that make sport career aspirations a priority among people who, as non-whites, are subjugated in other areas of life, such as in education, business and politics. Through sport, it is often felt, ‘minorities’ such as African–Americans and Indigenous Australians have a chance to ‘make it’, even though, in reality, the number of people who do reach professional sport is small. Tatz has argued that no ‘crapulous science’ can explain, through biology or genetics, the incredible will to win on the part of Aboriginal athletes who do reach the professional ranks of sport (Tatz, 1995a). Tatz’s fieldwork among rural and remote Aboriginal communities has been profoundly important for issues of wellness: he has shown that even if sport has an unusually elevated place in the lives of Indigenous youth, without that connection (and with few alternatives) they are more likely to experience social isolation and suicidal feelings (Tatz, 2007). The two major football leagues in Australia, the AFL and the NRL, are certainly trying to better understand, accommodate and develop Indigenous players. There are various programmes in place to allow for educational and vocational development among Aboriginal recruits; both leagues actively celebrate the Indigenous connection in their respective games, and there are efforts to connect remote Aboriginal communities with the Indigenous sport stars they typically idolise. The AFL and the NRL have an obvious interest in luring talent from within Indigenous ranks, but they are also gradually recognising that this brings with it wider responsibilities, not only to the recruited athletes but also to the wider Indigenous polity. The NRL, for example, has a Reconciliation Action Plan that was developed in consultation with senior Aboriginal players. The blueprint, which has been endorsed by Reconciliation Australia, ‘aims to promote cultural awareness, reading programs, healthy lifestyles, women in league programs, regional development and elite athlete development’ (Hunt, 2008). Sport, in this sense, is part of a means to an end, a society in which Aboriginal people are actively engaged in their own destiny. Just as important, there is a focus on developing the mind and understanding the health consequences of different types of behaviour. To sceptics, this may appear tokenistic. However, as Cockatoo-Collins (2009) has suggested, the more that Indigenous people are involved in the management of sport, the more likely it is that the needs and aspirations of Aboriginal athletes will be met.

Conclusion


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Folkloric and/or stereotypical beliefs about racial predispositions in sport are in need of critique. Ideas about the ‘natural’ Aboriginal athlete may sound innocuous enough, but if used to underpin assumptions that Indigenous people are by ‘nature’ deficient in other areas, such as intelligence (as with the brawn vs brain dichotomy noted in the US – Buffington and Fraley,


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2008), they become part of the apparatus of racism. This is an important reason for those involved in sport, whether players, coaches, fans or the media to reconsider assumptions about ‘natural’ predispositions for athletic acumen. The authors of this chapter are not Indigenous; nor have we been professional athletes. But we have endeavoured, through dialogue with Aboriginal people, to understand how and why sport matters to them, and why many of them feel that they have a natural affinity for physical activity. Stronach’s continuing research has been particularly important in that regard, though we also acknowledge the germinal work of Godwell, as well as more recent phenomenological studies and fieldwork by the likes of Gorman, Campbell, Tatz, and Hallinan and Judd. Without the insights of studies like these, anti-racist initiatives will be impoverished and lacking insight into other perspectives on racism. We have suggested that despite the popularity of sport in Aboriginal communities, most Indigenous people appear to be enthusiastic fans rather than active participants – much like non-Aboriginal Australians. While statistics about Indigenous sport participation are still a work in progress, it seems that rates of physical activity are higher among rural and remote Aboriginal people than those living in cities. Assumptions of ‘natural-born’ athletes are not new; nor are they peculiar to Australia and its Indigenous peoples. We have argued that self-belief has advantages: being able to aspire to something worthwhile and feeling confident in being able to perform are routine components of career attainment and advancement in a range of fields. The problem we have tried to identify, and which some Aboriginal respondents have themselves recognised, is that in the words of Godwell, Indigenous people ‘run the risk of being typecast in life as sportspeople’ (Godwell, 2000: 16). There are, of course, Aboriginal achievers in a range of other fields, notably art, dance and music, but these also accentuate the idea of Indigenous people as ‘performers’. There are, it must be said, good reasons to encourage and celebrate Aboriginal achievement in sport and other performance genres. But there are also good reasons to resource, facilitate and get excited about Indigenous career advancement in a range of other areas, whether business, medicine, tourism, the media and so on (Santow, 2010). To the surprise of many, the United States now has an African–American president. Why not an Aboriginal Prime Minister for Australia?

Notes



The authors would like to thank Dr Sean Gorman for providing resources to assist with this chapter. 1. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for 2005–7 indicate that the life expectancy of Indigenous men is 11.5 years lower than for non-Indigenous men, while life


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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.


expectancy of Indigenous women is 9.7 years lower than for non-Indigenous women (Statham, 2010). In 2001 the unemployment rate for Indigenous Australians was 20.0%, compared to 7.2% for non-Indigenous Australians (ABS, 2004a). For example, 39% of Indigenous students stayed on to year 12 at high school, compared with 75% for the total Australian population (ABS, 2004b). Both high unemployment and low levels of education have impacted on the economic circumstances of Indigenous people. In 2002, the average household income for Indigenous Australian adults was 60% of the non-Indigenous average (ABS, 2005a). Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for 2004 indicate that ‘Indigenous persons were 11 times more likely to be in prison compared with non-Indigenous persons’, and that in 2003 some 20% of prisoners self-identified as Indigenous (ABS, 2005b). On 1 April 2010, with ongoing public funding of NITV yet to be confirmed, the channel’s Chief Executive Officer, Patricia Turner, used the programmes Marngrook and The Barefoot Rugby League Show to ask viewers ‘to write to the Federal Government with letters of support to help keep the channel on air’ (NITV, 2010). The ratios were 50% for remote areas and 45% for urban areas. This was in response to a question about whether interviewees had been physically active in the previous twelve months.


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9 Scott N. Brooks

In what has become a familiar conversation, the high and disproportionate number of Black males in collegiate and professional basketball (as well as American football) is seen as normal, yet something extraordinary and requiring explanation. There are explanations of why (racial difference) and how Blacks have adapted (sports fixation): Blacks are superior athletes because they have different types of muscles and higher levels of natural ability; Blacks are the descendents of the strongest slaves who endured slavery and were bred to work; Blacks are more aggressive and determined because of poverty, discrimination (real or perceived) and limited visible examples of success; and Blacks are fixated on sports and at a very early age they begin playing sports and considering sports, rather than education, as a means of upward mobility. But explanations that consider why Blacks might enter and excel in sports are only half the story. Aspirations and outcomes need to be understood as part of larger structural factors impacting individual decisions. The racial and ethnic makeup of collegiate and professional basketball is taken for granted and research rarely answers the question: how did Black men come to dominate particular sports? Hoop dreams1 are a structural phenomenon. Groups do not simply earn or gain a niche (Waldinger, 1996). People in control of opportunities (sport franchise owners, college administrators) give a niche to some group(s) and not to other groups. Moreover, ultimate control of the market and financial rewards remains in the hands of a small, affluent white group. When the notion of hoop dreams is deconstructed, a clear picture develops that shows how racial formation occurs in sports, and occupational fields generally, where people of colour have had to gain access. This picture also suggests ways to be proactive and anti-racist in future.


Just a Dream? Structure, Power and Agency in Basketball

Structure and Access Changing urban conditions and the increasing profitability of college and professional sports have worked together in opening Black males’ access 135


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to big-time athletics. The result has been a demographic shift in the racial makeup of basketball players and the increasing feasibility of Black males realising their basketball aspirations. Black males have felt pushed by poverty, unemployment and underemployment, and masculinity role strain (failing to live up to dominant, white standards of masculinity, such as the male provider role) and pulled by other factors (high salaries and fame) that have encouraged Black aspirations and interests, and even targeted Black athletes. This is particularly the case because Blacks are not the owners or power brokers of the sports industry (Shropshire, 1996). The presence of Black men in basketball, then, is not simply the result of their agency and fixation on sport. Rather, they were granted access by white college/university administrators and sports franchise owners. These power brokers opened the door to Black male athletic achievement, enabling them to win more games, increase their institutional visibility and recognition, and garner more profits by capitalising on Blacks as a labour force (Brooks and McKail, 2008). In baseball, Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the colour barrier occurred because Branch Richey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager and part owner, decided that he wanted to make a social and political statement, while improving his franchise. In 1928, Abe Saperstein founded and coached the Harlem Globetrotters (originally the Savoy Big Five of Chicago), providing one of the rare opportunities for Black men to play basketball professionally, although strictly for comedic and cultural entertainment. In much the same way, sports generally have become racially and gender integrated when white male owners/college administrators and coaches have decided they wanted them to be so. Their agency and power in this area explain the wide ranging history of Black acceptance and integration in sport. While some athletic teams recruited and played Black males in the 1950s, others failed to do so until the 1970s. Moreover, Black coaches still experience the institutionalised racism found in ‘last hired, first fired’ – the idea that Blacks are the last to earn a position but are the first ones fired (often becoming the scapegoat or the one to blame) when change is needed.2 Sometimes this has been in the midst of immense social pressure, but white male control remains: integration happens without threatening the hegemonic position of white men. This chapter ‘brings the structure back’ by presenting a framework for understanding power and how basketball evolved into a ‘Black’ sport. It also offers an ethno-historical case study from fieldwork to highlight the impact of structural antecedents on an individual’s actions, perceptions and understandings of their opportunities, and life chances.3


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A basketball legend Chuck Green4 is a Philadelphia high school basketball legend – a title used by local and national newspapers when describing him. His basketball


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Just a Dream? Structure, Power and Agency in Basketball 137

I am a guru. Don’t nobody in the world know as much about basketball as I do. That’s right. And I know from my own experience as a player and coach and referee. So there ain’t nothing you can teach me. I was a very good basketball player. Plus, I have coached for over 30 years at all levels. We start with little kids, 6th, 7th, 8th graders and go all the way up to the pros. So you ain’t gonna tell me nothing. Nothing! That’s right! Philadelphia presented plenty of opportunities for Chuck to play basketball while he was growing up in the 1940s and 50s. Public recreation centres throughout the city, YMCAs, church leagues and high school programmes enabled many young Black men to compete year-round. Chuck recalled that he had played baseball as well as basketball in his early years, but settled on basketball because it cost less and was more accessible. Baseball was expensive because it requires a mitt, ball and bat, whereas basketball only required a ball. Furthermore, more players were needed to play baseball. Chuck believed that cost and accessibility made basketball popular in his neighbourhood; he grew up in poor sections of Philadelphia (Ashe, 1988). Basketball was a strong presence in his South and North Philly neighbourhoods. In high school he was part of a championship season for his high school, a fact of which he proudly reminds folks. Chuck’s status as a basketball ‘guru’, or ga-roo as he would pronounce it, is not difficult to believe when considering his basketball history. Chuck was the captain and leading scorer for his high school, the only team to defeat Wilt Chamberlain and his famed Overbrook High School during Wilt’s tenure. Chuck earned first-team All Public League honours, which designated him as one of the five best players in the city at the time. Impressively, Chuck and Wilt’s Christian Street YMCA team won the national junior championship tournament in North Carolina (he has old newspaper clippings and a team picture and has clippings from interviews he has done regarding the championship). This marked the first time that an all Black team would win the national junior championship. Chuck talked about this time in his life and the championship trip.


career coincided with a demographic change that took place in collegiate and professional basketball. Chuck’s story offers a case study for understanding how time, structure and access affected his choices, decisions and life opportunities before the notion of ‘hoop dreams’ existed. Chuck is a self-proclaimed basketball guru (and others vouch for him) (Brooks, 2004).

Junior national championship Jewish man was paying me 40 pounds of meat a week to play for him. My mother would call him on Monday and say that she wanted five pounds of ground beef, three chickens and whatever. So, I was on the


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But I had a game with the white boys for the Jewish man. And the Jewish man knew that I was suppose to go to North Carolina. So he tells me ... [he interrupts his story] See now Scott, whites know what to do. He tells me that he needs me to play in the first game and then I could miss the second game while in North Carolina and be back for the third game, because you had to win two out of three to get to the championship. He says that if I play for him, he will give my mom the 40 pounds a week for the whole summer and that he will fly me to North Carolina after the first game so that I could meet the guys ‘cause we had to be there Monday night. If he flew me down I would beat them there! So I had a decision to make. My daddy told me that if I didn’t play for the meat, I better stay in North Carolina ‘cause I could not come back home. So the coach of the Philly [public league all-stars team] keep tellin’ me that they need me and he tell me that it’s a big game and that no team of Blacks has ever won the national championship cause’ they hadn’t let us play them before. So I sneak away with the team and go down South and I tell you Scott, I ain’t never been down South. So I didn’t know what to expect, but all I knew was that Blacks were slaves and pickin’ cotton. But we go into that first game and we whooped them. Then they [white tournament organisers] took our addresses and sent the local newspaper home for our folks to see. So I call home after the first game and talk to my mom. And she tells me that my father is real upset and that he said that I better not come home, but he wants to talk to me. So my dad get on the phone and tells me that that Jewish man had been to my home crying because I left to go to North Carolina. And that I better stay in North Carolina because I couldn’t come home, but if I lose to them crackers [white teams] I really couldn’t come home. So we get to the championship game and we playing this team with three seven footers and six-foot, nine-inch [in height] forwards and big guards. And we enter the gym and there were a few Blacks in the gym but mostly white folks and I was scared ‘cause I didn’t know what we was in for. You know. If we won, how those white folks gonna act? So those big ol’ white boys, huge horses, are puttin’ a hurtin’ on Wilt, cause they just too big, and we down by 12 with two minutes left.


all Philadelphia public all star team [another team] and that team was to go down to North Carolina and play the national championship for that level. Some of us were in high school and a few were freshmen in college. So the coach of that team laid it on me, told me I was the moral leader of the team and that I had to go to North Carolina because the other Black boys needed me.

So the coach call a time out and he didn’t know what to say to us. The few Black folks there were all quiet and on edge. He was a bad coach. He was


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You know how we did it, Scott? We picked up 90 feet [played full-court defence] and pressed those crackers. They hadn’t seen that before. And then I get a break and I go to lay it up, and I hear the whistle and I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, I got the bucket and free throw’. But instead the ref go like this [Chuck does the hand signals for offensive foul] and waves it off. SB: He waves it off? He called a charge? Yeah! So we know how they going to call it. So we get the ball again and we tie it and then we go up by 8 points with twenty seconds left, so I tell the guys that we going to do the touring show. You know like the Harlem Globetrotters, cause they [my teammates] knew how to pass that ball around. So we pass that ball around and dribble and when I get the ball I fake at the big white boy on me and he didn’t know what to do, so I go by him and dribble down the lane and then around and they can’t touch us. And we told Wilt to get in the corner so the ref couldn’t call no shit on him in the key. When it get to 7 seconds you know what I do? I throw the ball straight in the air. And everybody just look up at the ball. But see they couldn’t call nothing on us [bad fouls or calls to stop the clock] so we won the game. Now, after the game there was this banquet, and we was real unsure and quiet because we didn’t know what was up. And they didn’t know what to do cause’ we weren’t supposed to win, ya know. But they had this real nice banquet and spread with fried chicken and shrimp all laid out. And the white team was already there and they were sitting down at a big long table and we wasn’t moving. Then one of those big white boys stands up and says, ‘you all is the best basketball team I’ve ever seen’. And that loosened us up a little bit, but I was looking at those white sheets on the table and didn’t know if they was going to put those on and come after us. But they treated us real nice. And now Scott all these folks [white people] come up to me and tell me how great it was what we did back then. This story highlights a few things: the historical time and race relations; how Chuck came to see himself as a basketball player; and the dilemma of playing basketball for pay and his family’s benefit versus playing for his race and community. Chuck was raised during the time when the South and North were still seen as two distinct worlds following different racial rules, even if only explicitly. As a Philadelphia native or Northern city boy, Chuck’s perception


a great guy, but a bad coach. All he could say was, ‘if you can find it in your heart, we can win this game’. And I look at Wilt and I say, ‘let’s beat these muthafuckers’. So we go back out on the floor and with one minute left we had got 8 or 9 points back.


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Scott N. Brooks

of the South was rooted in his knowledge of the tradition of slavery and Jim Crow laws. He saw the South as backward because Blacks, he thought, were still directly under the finger of whites. In Philadelphia, a complicated stratification system existed, which distinguished more between white ethnic groups, who were also in greater numbers than down South. Blacks were still at the bottom of the stratified system, to be sure, but Chuck perceived treatment of Blacks in the South to be worse because the North was more integrated. He was playing on a team with whites and being paid handsomely by a Jewish businessman;5 in the South, Blacks and whites did not mix. Going to the South could be very dangerous, yet his personal experience and later learning about the South dispelled his earlier preconceptions. The success of Chuck’s team in North Carolina had a big impact on his life. Chuck was a member of other championship teams and his success on the court became a significant part of his self-identity. The trip was the farthest he had travelled and his team won the tournament under hostile conditions. His team was all Black, and the opposing team, referees and majority of fans were all white. Chuck and his team-mates feared what might happen if they won. What would the white folks do to them? But in the end, the team was applauded for their effort and victory. Winning or losing the game was not the only thing at stake in the tournament. As Chuck detailed, his father was unhappy about him not playing for the white team in Philadelphia, which would have put more food on the table for the family, but Chuck was instructed not to come home if he lost to the ‘crackers’. The draw of the championship was ultimately greater than playing for money. Chuck’s team had achieved a first and they are honoured at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Chuck returned home to a proud family; his father understood the game’s significance and was proud of the accomplishment. For Chuck, this tournament and his decision to go to North Carolina with the team was a choice about racial group loyalty. Chuck placed the team over himself, upsetting his father and not providing food to his family. The Black coach ‘laid it on’ Chuck, played the race card, and Chuck took a side. On another occasion when facing a similar dilemma, playing for a white team for pay or for a Black team with his friends, he again chose to play for the Blacks because he said he had to play for his people and with his friends. Playing for whites was business. Playing for Blacks was being loyal; it was an obligation and a responsibility. In many ways this trip and Chuck’s decision to buy into the ‘moral’ argument of playing for the race and to beat whites is foundational to Chuck’s character as an old head and community elder. He faced this choice on several occasions, and didn’t always take the ‘moral’ path, but he considered it each time. Chuck appears to be guided less by money and personal fame; instead he is interested in helping others, particularly those of his race. He says, ‘I ain’t anti-white or Jew (or any other group), I’m pro-Black’. For him


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this is natural. However, this is not simple altruism. He gains status for being a community-minded person, for mentoring and helping young Black men, and for being a great former basketball player, a coach, and someone who had some impact on famous players. His actions impress those he wishes to impress and who would consider his actions worthy of high esteem. Chuck has wondered how his life might have been different had he not made decisions which placed importance on racial group solidarity and family instead of individual mobility, or on his ideal of morality as opposed to doing whatever it took to earn money.

‘Wasn’t in the cards?’ One may also wonder what happened to Chuck’s hoop dream when considering the mega-stardom that close friend and Hall of Famer, Wilt Chamberlain, achieved. When asked, Chuck responds easily, ‘it just wasn’t in the cards’ and explains that basketball was not as lucrative then as it is today, and there were barriers to playing in college and professionally. Chuck didn’t see college as a viable option. The recruitment of young Black men to play in college was limited, plus Chuck’s family conditions were strained; he was one of ten children and needed to earn money as early as possible. Chuck played semi-professionally but not for the NBA. He claims that ‘semi-professional’ is a misnomer, since the distinction between amateur and professional is payment for playing ball and he was paid to play. He was blocked from playing professionally by early rules that regulated how many and which Blacks could enter the NBA. When I graduated from high school I knew I had to get a job because my brothers had did it and I knew that my momma needed my help. When I was playin’ semi-pro, which was really pro basketball. I ask people, ‘what is semi-pro?’ Either you playin’ pro or you’re not. That’s right, if they payin’ you, you a pro. But they called us semi-pro because we weren’t in their [white or predominantly white, American Basketball League] league, where they excluded us anyway. But they used to pay me $150 a game and I knew that my momma was gonna lean on me for fifty for meats and french fries. And that’s what my brothers and sisters cared about those meats and french fries. So, if I was hurt it didn’t matter, I had to play. When they paid me $150, it was like payin’ Shaq [Shaquille O’Neal] $100 million. I mean I was the man in my time. Michael Jordan, Shaq, none of them were nothing to me in my time. But they [whites] always wanted to say that we couldn’t make it in the League [the professional ranks]. But they wouldn’t let us play. They said you had to be a college graduate. But they tried to mess with our heads. It’s like they sayin’ you couldn’t shoot like that on Scott, but if I could shoot I could shoot anywhere. So, I knew that I could play, but some brothas got down on themselves for




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In my day the only way Blacks got in the pros was through the Globetrotters. They was connected. And you had to have a college degree to get in the pros and that’s how they excluded us. Wilt played for the Globetrotters and they asked me to play but it just wasn’t in the cards for me. But I’m happy. There were very few Black professional basketball players when Chuck was that age and a Black player could not be drafted unless they had some college experience. This was the major limiting factor for Chuck and many others. Chuck says that ignorance kept him out of college. He simply did not know about college, its possible advantages, and was afraid to move to the South because of what he had heard about and seen regarding race relations. He feared that he might get hung because of his ‘city’ attitude and unwillingness to defer to whites as he felt Southern Blacks did. But the South was where most Blacks attended college and were recruited as athletes because most of the Black colleges are located in the South. His decision not to attend school was also influenced by the size of his family at home and his feeling that he had a responsibility to assist his parents with paying bills and taking care of younger siblings. Chuck played for money in local ‘semi-professional’ teams and had a brief window of opportunity to play for the famed Harlem Globetrotters. He still has the letter of invitation from the Globetrotters and showed it off proudly to me. He felt that trying out for the Globetrotters would have been a huge risk if he were to fail to make it, and he was already guaranteed pay by his semi-professional teams. The possibility of failing, he says, was not based on a fear that he might not be good enough, but on politics: that certain players would be more desirable than him because of their collegiate background and popularity. This was not a simple class issue: most Blacks were of the same class at the time because of America’s institutionalised racism, which maintained a racial order in terms of class, housing, and work.6


that, believing they weren’t good enough. But I always knew I was good enough. It’s just like Josh Gibson [Hall of Fame, Negro League Baseball Player]. He hit a hundred homeruns for that Pittsburgh team [Pittsburgh Crawfords, a Negro baseball league team] and they try to tell him, ‘yeah, but he couldn’t do that in the Pros [white, Major League Baseball]’. Josh Gibson could hit anywhere.

The push-pull of hoop dreams: how the macro becomes micro Basketball began in 1891 and has gone through many alterations and adaptations. Initially, and through most of the 1950s, professional players earned small dollars for playing and worked during their off season to make ends meet because their basketball salaries alone could not sustain a family. The


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professionalisation of basketball, particularly for inner-city Black males, coincides with the dramatic change in college and professional sports. Early on teams and leagues were, of course, segregated, but an increasing emphasis upon winning opened spots on college teams for a few Black men in the first half of the twentieth century. Generally, Blacks who entered college at this time were outstanding student athletes (for example, Paul Robeson) and primarily interested in earning a degree and being upwardly mobile in something beyond sport after graduation because there was better money to be made (Orr, 1969). More Blacks were given opportunities to play professionally and in college after World War II, the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, and Jackie Robinson’s successful re-desegregation of baseball.7 Still, college basketball had not changed much. The greatest impact on the integration of college basketball was the surprising defeat of dynastic University of Kentucky, under Adolph Rupp, by the all-Black starting five of Texas Western (now University of Texas, El Paso) to win the 1966 college basketball championship (Fitzpatrick, 1999). The game showed that Black players brought something new to the game in terms of entertainment and the new television market for college basketball grew exponentially over the next decades (Smith, 2001). Blacks came to see basketball as an opportunity to earn a scholarship to college and attain a high-paying career. With the ‘hardship rule’, Spencer Haywood and the Seattle Supersonics (of the ABA) ushered in the contemporary era of younger Black men entering the professional ranks, including some directly from high school. Haywood declared himself eligible for the professional draft before his class was due to graduate, because his family faced financial hardship and becoming a professional would let him help his family. The NBA adopted the ‘hardship rule’ in 1971 after the ABA folded. By 1970, the average professional basketball salary was $35,000, and by 1980 average salaries jumped to $180,000. Franchise values appreciated more than 600% in the same period (Friedman, 2005), affirming the racial change and public acceptance of Black males as professional athletes. The supposed fear held by some white franchise owners that having Blacks would lessen their profits – whites wouldn’t pay to see ‘jungle ball’ – was reduced, although it clearly remains an issue in the business of sports; see Leonard (2006). Coincidentally, a change in the urban landscape occurred during the same period. The 1960s to 1970s was a time of great economic and social change, exacerbating the urban condition. Wilson (1987: 140) wrote: In the mid-1960s, urban analysts began to speak of a new dimension to the urban crisis in the form of a large sub-population of low-income families and individuals whose behavior contrasted sharply with the behavior of the general population. Despite a high rate of poverty in ghetto neighborhoods throughout the first half of the twentieth century, rates of inner-city joblessness, teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock




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Thus, young Black men in the inner city felt a push from their communities to pursue basketball as well as illicit activities, because poverty had worsened. At the same time there was a pull from colleges, universities and professional ranks, who wanted to win more games and improve their profitability. These push-pull effects created the hoop dream: unbridled hope in athletic achievement as a means to escape the urban crisis. Many colleges stepped up their efforts to recruit Black men from the inner city. Rooney (1980) notes that from 1961 to 1980 young Black men from the inner city were courted assiduously and paid to play for colleges, often far away from their home, both in terms of distance and culturally. New York City and environs, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles are the hunting grounds of most serious recruiters. In these seven cities, the talent seekers could have observed over one-quarter of the major college players recruited since 1961. (1980: 133) Playgrounds in the Blackest and poorest neighbourhoods were considered the best places to find Black talent. Two classic books by sports journalists have documented this trend intimately via participant observation in New York: Pete Axthelm’s A City Game (1970) and Rick Telander’s Heaven is a Playground (1976). Professional basketball in the 1970s and 80s flip-flopped from a modest business enterprise to a huge multi-million dollar industry. Black players became household names and were given commercial endorsement deals. Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving, Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, Michael Jordan and some others represented the new NBA as flashy, entertaining and extremely athletic. In addition, there was an unprecedented move by sports apparel companies who signed contracts with colleges to wear their apparel and paid incredible salaries, separate from their team salaries, to these (and other) marketable professional athletes. The 1992 Olympics and basketball’s ‘Dream Team’ was proof that the NBA had grown into a global phenomenon. Murals of Michael Jordan were multi-stories tall in the heart of Barcelona, and the team travelled in a security motorcade equalling rock star status.


births, female-headed families, welfare dependency, and serious crime were significantly lower than in later years and did not reach catastrophic proportions until the mid-1970s.

Blade Rodgers League and the niche Towards the end of Chuck’s playing days, he and a number of other semipro basketball players and enthusiasts from Philadelphia formed the Brown


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Leagues, named after a city commissioner who had allowed them to play in a gymnasium. This was a pro league that played during the summer. Chuck and the other co-founders recognised the significance that basketball had had in their lives and felt that a developmental league for youngsters might be beneficial for the various poor Black communities of Philadelphia. This organisation, named the Blade Rodgers League after one of the co-founders, became and continues to be a steadying presence in Philadelphia. It is a ‘career’ league: one where the best players play and are seen and it is considered important in testing their ability. Henry Ryan, the league’s historian, discussed its mission: Blade [Rodgers] says the league began in ’68, but the records began in ’69. They developed the league to help the city get over gang wars and foster human relations. I think that basketball was related with good intentions to improve Philadelphia high school basketball. It was a big brother–little brother programme that began with the Brown Leagues [the original adult league] and then graduating seniors [in high school] on down. The Varsity [eleventh and twelfth grade] League had teams to the Brown [adult] League teams, and guys would talk to the younger guys. Then the Next Generation [ninth and tenth grade] League began because there were too many kids that wanted to play and not enough teams. Back then, Paul Jacks ran the mandatory tutoring programme, and they kicked players out of the programme for absence, because producing great players with no education prevented them from going to college. In our league they [kids] learned to play the right way to prepare them for college. The league was a feeding ground where college coaches could see serious ball. You would see Denny Crum [longtime coach at the University of Louisville], John Thompson [Hall of Fame coach for Georgetown University], [Dean] Smith’s assistants [Hall of Fame coach for the University of North Carolina]. The Rodgers League was supposed to save people from the most unscrupulous people [bad college coaches and agents]. Lower Division 1, Division 2, and Division 3 [collegiate competition levels, Division 1 being the highest and most competitive] schools come to check out players too. Guys were being discovered in the Blade Rodgers League. There are so many [former] players who now have sons coming up; they know what the league is all about. So it’s still pretty much known that this is the place to go if you’re serious. This is not a fun league. This is a career league. People have stopped coming because they don’t look as good. Instead, they go where nobody is telling you tuck your shirt in and watch your mouth. They [players in the Rodgers League] shoot and score less and they have to play defence.




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Scott N. Brooks

The league’s mission continues to be for kids to become successful basketball players, on and off the court. Over a forty-year span, Blade Rodgers alumni have earned more than three hundred college scholarships to play collegiate basketball, and over thirty former players went on to play professionally. Notably, a number of Blade Rodgers League alumni, white and Black, are professional players or college coaches, and a smaller number are NBA executives. The league endures and has a vast network that helps young men to advance to higher levels. Blade Rodgers also prides itself on helping young men to find more opportunities for success and to become men who are good citizens. Older men work with young men to teach and enforce the understanding necessary for organised basketball. Kids are expected not only to learn how to play according to the conventions to improve their basketball play, but to improve their personal character as well (fostering qualities such as responsibility, cooperation with others and the management of anger). The mission and efforts of the Blade Rodgers League also illustrate the effect of Blacks being given access to white colleges and the professional ranks in significant numbers. This access created new a possibility: young Black inner-city boys could realistically aspire to attend colleges. The opening and rush to the inner city by colleges also fostered growth in grass-roots basketball; more leagues sprang up to meet the demand of youth interest in basketball. Sport apparel companies created their own youth basketball organisations. And adults, white and Black, mostly male, became summer league coaches and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) travel coaches.8 Of course, this growth and the potential for making money gave rise to some unscrupulous behaviour, but as a result of profit-making at the highest structural levels and not Black pathology; adults and kids began looking for their ‘piece of the pie’. Basketball has become an economy where white colleges and universities feverishly seek young Black men from the inner city for their perceived athletic superiority and mental and physical toughness. The economy has created informal and unstable jobs for Black men who coach youth basketball and can recruit young men and hand-deliver top prospects to colleges. These men have sometimes been paid under the table, but most of them were and are exploited by college coaches and the sporting industry that needs them to find the talent. Some have learned that their connection and closeness to young prospects is their only leverage and guarantee for earning a cheque.9 Thus, finding and catching the most talented young Black men has become a way to a better life for many neighbourhood, high school, college and professional coaches.


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Conclusion: hoop dreams as an example of racial formation Hoop dreams are not the creation of poor Black folks. Blacks’ access to college and professional basketball cannot be taken for granted. Labelling hoop


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dreams as either good or bad is therefore trite, a classic case of ‘blaming the victim’, and one that limits our theoretical understanding. Hoop dreams reflects how racial formation (Omi and Winant 1986) actually works. Racial formation is a fluid process of racial exclusion (micro) and hegemonic control (macro) that reinforces racial hierarchy over time. Hoop dreams narrow identity options for young Black men, internally and externally, as not only do young Black men consider being an athlete as a realistic niche opportunity (at various levels), but non-Blacks (and many Blacks) believe young Black men to be ‘natural’ athletes. This informs interaction, perception and the advice given to young Black men (for example, a tall, young Black man is asked if he is an athlete in non-academic settings like an airport or graduate school class). The effect grows when class is significant. Young Black men from poor, working class backgrounds see themselves as either a thug, rapper/musician or an athlete (Brooks, 2009) because poor Blacks typically live in inner cities and attend low performing schools in communities threatened by violence and drugs. Granting access and then naming Black men as ‘natural’ athletes is also a marker of what young Blacks are not. Confronting racism, then, requires challenging micro and macro level issues – psychological, social and structural effects. Young people need to be told of their worth and possibilities; policy needs to create and address discrimination and opportunity at the highest levels (professional ownership and collegiate administration); and social movements and other aggregate level action need to insist on bridging the gap between the haves and have-nots. It is not enough to tell young people that they can be anything, there needs to be consistent and reliable guidance and mentorship that grants opportunities, resources and support to show them how to get on the right path and how to succeed. Moreover, in America, the paucity of Blacks (men and women) in sports management, administration and ownership (relative to the percentage of Blacks who compete at the highest levels) indicates the same process of racial exclusion as that experienced by the players themselves. Only seven of the 120 top-division college (American) football programmes have black coaches – plus one Latino and one Polynesian (Lapchick, 2009). Whites hold over 90% of athletic director positions at colleges and universities. There is still stacking and steering. Blacks are typically hired to coach sports where blacks are overrepresented; the same small number of coaches are recycled (first in line to earn new job openings); and Black coaches are steered into particular types of coaching and usually come from the same discipline (defence rather than offence in American football, which remains overwhelmingly white) and background (former athletes). In the face of this, an effective anti-racist agenda has to consider historical patterns and their effect, as well as the present status of racial and gender exclusion, and expand opportunities for women and people of colour, former and non-former standout athletes, at all levels of sports.




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1. The ‘hoop dream’ is a symbol of black pathology and deviance. It is the unrealistic hope of becoming a professional basketball player, typically held by poor black males and their families. While the phrase had been used earlier, a 1994 documentary, ‘Hoop Dreams’, brought the phrase into everyday conversation. Two white film writers followed the lives of two poor, black Chicago boys, Arthur Agee and William Gates, as they played high school basketball and pursued their dreams of becoming superstars. The documentary shows the ups and downs of living in poverty (inability to meet basic needs, drug-addicted father, high school drop out brother, teen pregnancy, as well as high school graduation and a college athletic scholarship for one of the players). While it clearly shows how important basketball is as an institution (part of a positive male identity, prized and encouraged by loved ones), the documentary did not show any of the structural factors, such as the college recruiting machine, university and athletics administration. The picture only depicts what is wrong with poor, black families. 2. A 2002 report by Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri (attorneys) highlights how black coaches in America’s National Football League (NFL) are hired with much better resumés, but fired with more victories and fewer losses than their white counterparts. 3. This chapter is part of a much larger ethnographic project. Ethnography is the systematic study of culture gathered through in-depth participant observation. Ethnography is more than just interviews: it requires a prolonged presence whereby the researcher seeks to become an insider or to gain an insider’s perspective. I spent over four years in the field gathering data as a basketball coach. I gathered narratives through informal and formal interviews over time, rather than in a single interview. Duplication in story-telling – subjects telling the same story over and over again – not only makes the narrative more complete, but also increases the validity of the story and our confidence in it, when it remains unchanged apart from new details. Facts were also checked through other sources, subjects and archival data, such as newspaper reports and photographs. 4. People and organisations that I studied have been given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. 5. It is true that ethnic whites are not the same as ‘non-ethnic’ or ‘WASP’ whites; they have alternative experiences in treatment and acceptance. Some ethnic white, such as Irish, have ‘become white’ (Ignatiev). However, the white phenotype has enabled whites to be seen as white, take advantage of white privilege, and thereby receive better treatment than people of colour (McIntosh). Chuck did not separate whites because relative to him they were all the same. There was a strict racial order, not an ethnic order that he recognised, and he was at the bottom when he played for ‘white’ teams that were primarily Irish and Jewish men. Chuck recalled being told not to shoot too much, after making a game winning shot. He also was recruited to ‘rebound’ and ‘play defence’, and not to shoot. He recalls getting a pass only after the star white players had had multiple opportunities to score. 6. Research on housing shows that this still exists. Massey and Denton (1993) highlight how significant residential segregation is to poverty concentration, social segregation, and maintaining a racial order. 7. While Jackie Robinson typically talked about ‘desegregating’ baseball, this is in fact a misnomer. Segregation in baseball took time. American baseball took off in the 1850s and for a short while – in 1878 and again in 1884 – African–American


Notes


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players played professional baseball. Over time, they were increasingly excluded. There were a few exceptions, as professional Major League Baseball followed minor league baseball in racial segregation. By 1890, professional and minor league baseball was all white. The Negro Leagues grew out of this separation. Segregation would remain until 1946, when Jackie Robinson played for the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm league team. 8. The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) is a large, non-profit, volunteer sports organisation in the United States. It was founded in 1888 to establish standards and uniformity in amateur sport and, at the highest level, to help prepare youth for the national Olympic programme. It is a multi-sport organisation, dedicated to the promotion and development of amateur sports and physical fitness programmes. Despite the organisation’s contributions to youth, there are many negative aspects to the industry, including illegal recruitment (paying for the travel of high profile players from across the country to play for a team) and connections between apparel and shoe companies that influences where players go to college. In my research on high school aged players, I knew of an AAU coach who used team money for personal purposes. For more information on this topic, see Wetzel and Yaeger (2000). 9. There are several examples of this corruption. Most recently, the ‘friend’ of former University of Southern California basketball star O.J. Mayo was identified as taking money from the university coach Tim Floyd, which led to the coach being fired.




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Global Integration in the Nation: The Emergence of Non-White Athletes and Anti-Racist Initiatives in Norwegian Elite Sport Mette Andersson

Introduction The Norwegian delegation to the opening ceremony of the Bejing Summer Olympics in 2008 was for the first time ever led by a ‘visible’ minority athlete. The choice of the female weightlifter Ruth Kasirye as the bearer of the Norwegian flag was commented on in many newspapers in the following weeks. The leadership of the Norwegian Sport Federation and Olympic Committee (NIF/NOK) explained to the media that the choice of Kasirye was a signal of inclusion and the multicultural character of Norwegian sport.1 Most editors on sports pages and other newspaper sections agreed with this interpretation and supported the choice, claiming it as an important declaration on the part of Norwegian sport and in Norway more generally. Kasirye’s gender and colour worked together to signify a symbolic inclusion of two categories of individuals central to recent integration and anti-discrimination debates in Norway. A general point throughout this article is that ‘race’, racism and diversity in Norway, and in Norwegian sport, give out ambivalent and often contradictory messages. Norway has a long history of international excellence in winter sport, where cross-country skiing, skating and ski jumping are the sports most closely associated with national identity. These sports have been, and still are marked by whiteness. In sport, as in other parts of society, norms expressed in top-down policy documents, and practices and experiences on the ground, belong to different social registers. On the ground, in sport clubs and teams, age group, type of sport and achievement level are variables influencing inclusion and racialisation processes. In addition, the framing of specific sporting contexts by the media and the governing bodies of sport influences how an athlete, or a particular case, is interpreted


10

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by fans and the general public. The choice and the framing of Kasirye as the Norwegian flag-bearer in the Bejing Olympics touch upon many distinctions. She is an elite athlete from a sport that rarely attracts attention in the Norwegian media. In the Olympic setting, however, she becomes a symbol for a top-down policy of inclusion. While editors saluted the choice of Kasirye, other opinions surfaced in protest emails to the Norwegian Olympic committee and on the debate pages of local newspapers. On 13 August 2008, in the local newspaper Fredrikstad Blad, for instance, a local male reader argued that it was wrong to select a non-white person as a flagbearer in the Olympics. His main argument was that Kasirye was a person Norwegians in general not could identify with. This reader’s comment was followed by a longer debate in the newspaper, and the editor was accused of publishing racist arguments. While the Kasirye case illustrates differences between top-down and certain bottom-up majority perspectives, other cases involving non-white top athletes in Norway illustrate the importance of excellence if an athlete is to be categorised as ‘truly’ Norwegian. In 2007, the summer before the Bejing Olympics, another non-white Norwegian athlete became a national media celebrity. Sprinter Jaysuma Saidi N’Dure, Norwegian citizen of Gambian background, broke the Norwegian record for the 100 meters in August 2007. After this event, Norwegian sports pages praised N’Dure’s achievement and his Norwegian-ness. Earlier in the summer, on 5 July 2007, when N’Dure first broke his personal record, the biggest Oslo newspaper, Aftenposten, featured an article entitled ‘Victim of big politics’, stating that ‘Jaysuma is Norwegian after having lived and trained in Norway since 2002’. The article described how the Gambian track and field association threatened N’Dure with a three-year quarantine after he changed his citizenship from Gambian to Norwegian in 2006. The article’s main message, like that of many similar articles in the same period, was that N’Dure risked not being allowed to compete for Norway in future international championships, such as the summer Olympics the following year. A few days after the new national record, the Norwegian public was informed that earlier in the summer N’Dure had tested positive for cannabis after a track and field meeting in Lucerne. The first sentence in the 15 August 2007 Aftenposten article commenting on this test was ‘The Norwegian–Gambian sprinter was released with a warning’. From being praised for his Norwegian-ness throughout the summer, N’Dure was now, in the cannabis context, not simply Norwegian. The two examples of Kasirye and N’Dure illustrate how sporting context (Olympics, positive dope-testing) influences media portrayal, and also how top-down policies and bottom-up perspectives on non-white top athletes may differ significantly. Both athletes were Norwegian citizens. Other categories of non-white athletes include professional sport migrants playing in Norway with foreign citizenship, and minority ethnic children, adults


Global Integration in the Nation


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and youth playing in ordinary leagues/events at lower levels. Different categories of non-white athletes are seen to pose different challenges for sport federations and local sport clubs. The general attention to racism in Norway, integration debates, and recent immigration history as well as sports history are among the macro-conditions framing how racism, non-white athletes and multiculturalism are interpreted and treated in Norwegian sports clubs, leagues/events and federations. My analysis of the emergence of non-white athletes, racialisation, and anti-racist initiatives in Norwegian sports is based on a broad collection of data on non-white elite athletes produced from 2002 to 2004. 2 The data were not produced in order to evaluate the level of racism in Norwegian sports or the effect of anti-racist campaigns, but the data includes interviews with pioneers of anti-racist campaigns in Norway and with athletes who talk about explicit and implicit discrimination. The research aimed to develop an explorative analysis of to what degree, and how, the increasing number of non-white athletes representing Norway in international competitions has influenced the general debate on integration and ethnic/ racial minorities in sport and in the country in general. Different sports were considered with respect to two central criteria: (1) the number of non-white elite athletes, and (2) Media coverage of the sport in national TV and newspapers. The three sports chosen were basketball, football and track and field, and the data consisted of interviews with non-white elite athletes, sport journalists, sport leaders, anti-racist campaign leaders and representatives of ethnic minority based organisations. Participant observation in matches and meetings, and media articles on non-white athletes were other data sources. One of the central findings of the research was that concern about racism in sports, as well as the development of anti-racist initiatives, was strongly influenced by a broader European debate, and especially by how these themes were developing in the UK. Consciousness about racism in sport, and preparedness to actively support anti-racist campaigns, varied between sports. The three sport federations addressed such issues from different positions, partly conditioned by how the same sports were racialised globally. A transnational lens focussing on the movement beyond and across borders of athletes, of cultural and biological racial stereotypes, of racism(s) and anti-racist activism is a useful theoretical starting point to explore the emergence of these themes in the Norwegian sport setting.

Theoretical approaches to the globalisation of race and racism


152 Mette Andersson

From the 1990s, theories of globalisation have focussed on the economic, cultural, political and technological dimensions of globalisation. The movement of people has received less attention than the movement of capital (Moses, 2006), and racism and the global relevance of race and racialisation


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has seldom been mentioned in general theories of globalisation (Knowles, 2003). In the field of race and racism studies, the 1990s was a period for more context-sensitive and multi-sited approaches to racism and racialisation, where questions of scale (focus on locality, various institutional histories) and the multiple faces of racism (coded in terms of culture, ethnicity, nation and religion) were the centre of attention. And in migration studies, the 1990s gave birth to an explicit transnational approach, where a critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences was developed (Basch et al., 2003 [1994]; Smith and Guarnizo, 2007). In the same period, Diaspora studies became prominent (Brah, 1996; Anthias, 1998), often – but not always – coupled with critical race theory and postcolonial theory. The explicit transnational approach in migration studies mainly focussed on the transnational links between migrant populations in the West and the ‘home country’. Critical race and racism researchers, as well as Diaspora researchers were, however, more sceptical of what some saw as a continuing focus on essentialist conceptions of culture and ethnicity, albeit now of transnational scope. Among the early exceptions to these two 1990s developments (critique of methodological nationalism in the incipient transnational paradigm in migration research, and critique of cultural/ethnic essentialism and nationalism in racism and critical race studies) was Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic (1993). The Black Atlantic focussed on transnational processes and linkages based in the position of racialised native and immigrant minorities. In the book, African–American travel across the Ocean, the crafting of transnational humanist imaginaries, and social and political opposition in academia, music and sport are the main empirical references. The Black Atlantic perspective bridges the general critique of methodological nationalism in transnationalism studies with a critique of cultural, national and ethnic essentialism from critical race studies and postcolonial studies (Andersson, 2007b, 2008). In merging the central concerns of several emerging paradigms in migration studies, Diaspora studies, and critical race and racism studies, Gilroy offered a venue for analysing transnational social and political mobilisation among racialised ethnic and religious minority aggregates in Western Europe (Andersson, 2007b). Later, other major theorists in critical race and racism studies opened nation-based theoretical frameworks to include the globalisation of race and racism. In his more recent work, Howard Winant (2000; 2004), for example, insists that a racial formation perspective needs to take into account the global dimension of racism and racialisation. He argues that ‘globalisation is a re-racialisation of the world’ and that ‘North–South issues are also deeply racial issues’ (Winant, 2000: 131). Winant states that on the global scene, we now see two major racial formations; formulated as the (continuing) North–South axis and the West–East axis, which is of increasing visibility and relevance. More explicitly, and with a specific focus on Europe, Alana Lentin (2008)




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Mette Andersson

and David Theo Goldberg (2006) both stress how Europe since the Second World War has avoided the topic of race and instead embraced the terminology of integration, ethnicity and culture. Colonialism and imperialism is forgotten, re-coded in history books as Europe’s integration of other peoples and cultures, and the civilising mission of Europe again rationalises wars and economic regulations in the South and the East. Goldberg uses the term ‘racial avoidance’ (Goldberg 2006: 343) to characterise the European approach to race and racism. In the wake of the Holocaust, Goldberg notes, mainstream European thinking about race pursued three interrelated paths: denial of race as social, politically and morally relevant; an overriding focus on anti-Semitism as the real (and almost only) manifestation of racism; and the racial de-linking of the intellectual and political histories of colonialism and racism. A central argument in both Goldberg’s and Lentin’s articles about race in Europe is that racism and race are seen as irrelevant to Europe after the Holocaust, that racism is relegated to the US and other continents, and that race is coded into what are seen as the less dangerous categories of ethnicity and cultural and religious difference. In Europe, the UK and, to some extent, France may be seen as differing somewhat from this generalised image, in the sense that political awareness and political mobilisation against racism and Islamophobia among minority groups themselves have longer traditions than in most other European countries. There is, in these countries, a larger critical anti-racist mass, and, not least, leading theorists and researchers (such as Etienne Balibar, Michel Wieviorka, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Michael Banton and Robert Miles), who bring the themes of race and racism into the curricula of their disciplines and into the public domain more generally. In Norway, there is still limited interest and funding for research on racism, and most researchers who have dealt with racism have engaged in micro-level studies. The dominant approach in the last decades of the twentieth century was to argue in favour of a strict definition of racism as an ideology of a biological race hierarchy. Racism was, with a few exceptions, defined as individual ideological assent to the old biological race doctrine, captured nicely in a book title arguing against a broad definition of racism: ‘The word that marks the devil’ (Lien, 1997). In recent years a few Norwegian migration researchers have started linking race and racism to the newer European debates on cultural racism, Islamophobia, differentialist racism, or to the broader European and Western history of old and new colonialisms. Anti-racist activists in Norway, however, have since the late 1970s operated with more radical and broader approaches to racism and race (Nydal, 2007), inspired by developments in British research and theorisation of race and racism. Racism in sport is a new theme in Norwegian (as well as Scandinavian) research (Andersson, 2008), and researchers as well as sport activists in this field draw upon theories and empirical research developed elsewhere. As the Norwegian population becomes increasingly multi-ethnic,


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and second-generation immigrants start experiencing discrimination, these themes will hopefully be given more attention. A survey among immigrants from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and South and Latin America showed that in 2006 50% had experienced (according to self-reporting) discrimination in public transport, from the police, in public places, at work/schools, in banks/post offices, and/or in the housing market – one or more times (Integrerings- og mangfoldsdirektoratet, 2008). Immigrants with backgrounds from Africa report being discriminated against more often than others, and the researchers conclude that skin colour and difference from the Nordic look increases the likelihood of experiencing discrimination. In 2009, 10.6% of the Norwegian population are immigrants (including second-generation immigrants).3 In Oslo, the percentage is 26, and in certain inner-city east and eastern suburbs, much higher. Norway was a late entry as an immigration destination for non-western individuals, but has become a multi-ethnic country in a relatively short period of time. Before Norway opened it borders to free migration inside the EU/EEC (2003), people of Pakistani background constituted the largest immigrant group, followed by Swedes, Iraqis, Somalis and Vietnamese. Although Poles now constitute the largest group, people with backgrounds from Asia, Africa and Latin America still constitute the major part of the total population of first and second generation immigrants that, since 1990, has grown from approximately 170,000 to 500,000 individuals.

Non-white athletes from exception to contextually coded normality White Norwegian Lars Hansen4 was a multi-ethnic sports pioneer when he started the inner-city east sports club Centre Sports in Oslo in 1987 (Andersson, 2002; 2005). Hansen’s main concerns were to offer young boys hanging around on street corners, and young minority girls with few opportunities for leisure activities, a positive milieu through sports. Young people’s own wishes were central to the club’s investment in basketball and volleyball in its formative years. The leader likened the situation for ethnic and racial minority youth in the late 1980s to his own experience of being a working class youth in the same area of Oslo in the 1950s. Looking back at the early days of the club, Hansen states that racism was more intense and widespread then than in the early years of the new millennium (interview, June 2002). In the early 1990s teenage basketball players were frequently racially abused at matches, and many of the players in Central Sports were not allowed to play, due to rules prohibiting more than two players of nonNorwegian citizenship on the court at the same time. These rules were originally part of the elite sport rules for professional sport migrants, but were in the early 1990s applied to children only 10–11 years old. As Larsen, leader of a club with members from 50 different ethnic backgrounds in the




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mid-1990s, argues, there was no experience of foreign citizens in Norwegian sport, and ‘we had to make it up as we went along’. Challenging local and national sports authorities on unfair rules was part of the game. In the early 1990s, sport for children and young people was the main context for multi-ethnic teams and racialisation in Norwegian sport. But this period also witnessed an increasing number of non-white elite athletes in football, track and field and basketball. Illustrative of how rare non-white Norwegian elite athletes had been, is the question put by a well known sport journalist (on the national Televison channel NRK) to the first nonwhite athlete to win his event in an international championship in the early 1980s. On prime time television the athlete was asked where he came from (interviews with the actual athlete and a sport journalist in NRK, 2002). He, who had grown up in a small town in the middle of Norway, answered in local dialect that he came from his home-town. The journalist repeated the question twice, when not getting the answer she wanted. Twenty years later a similar episode is unthinkable. In 2009, Norwegian track and field, as well as football and basketball, list many non-white athletes on the national teams as well as in the elite series of football and basketball. In football and basketball many players in the elite series are foreign imports from different African countries (mainly football) and North America (mainly basketball). Others are Norwegian citizens, second-generation immigrants or children of one white and one nonwhite parent. My research focussed on non-white Norwegian athletes who had grown up in Norway. Among these athletes, basketball players were more attuned to issues of race and racism than were footballers and runners (Andersson, 2007a). Dominant approaches to integration, racism and nonwhite athletes in the three Norwegian sports explored were closely related to the sports’ racial image on the global scene. Whereas basketball, for instance, was associated with a cultural ‘cool’ blackness – referring to the NBA and US rap and hip hop music – football and track and field had other racial signifiers. In track and field there was a preoccupation with the prominence of black sprinters and long distance runners. A typical excuse for not running integration or anti-racism campaigns in this sport was that whites needed encouragement to trust that they actually could beat the Africans, and that the sport was integrated on a global level. There was also tension around certain clubs featuring African runners in spring relays. One central Oslo club co-operated with a Kenyan club. Norwegian athletes trained in Kenya for parts of the year and Kenyan runners trained and competed in Norway in the Norwegian summer season. The Kenyans used to run for the Oslo club in some of the prestigious spring relays in the Oslo region. This was interpreted by other clubs as ‘unfair’ competition, and according to my informants, was the main reason why the national track and field association changed their rules so that non-citizens who in future wanted to represent a Norwegian club in relays would have to spend three months in Norway before running


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in relays for a Norwegian club. In football, a main preoccupation was with the rules for how many non-EU/EEC players could be listed on professional elite league teams. From the beginning of the millennium a few Norwegian clubs (for example, SK Brann, Lyn) started to specialise on various African countries in order to recruit players. As the number of non-European players in Norwegian elite football has increased, debates between the representatives of Norwegian elite clubs and the national football federation have at times been harsh. Accusations against the other side for being racist, for being raw capitalists or for not taking care of native players, have been common in debates on how many non-Bosman players each team should be able to list for matches. Sport migration, the racialisation of athletes (coded and un-coded), and racism in sport are transnational processes that have specific expressions in different nation-states and different localities. Norway is a latecomer when it comes to professionalism in football, immigration from non-Western countries, and in general and scientific debates about racism and discrimination. Although the anti-racist movement started in the 1970s in Norway (Nydal, 2007), and the Anti-racist centre in Oslo was early in catching up on debates on ‘new racism’ and cultural racism, the general attention to racism in Norway is low compared to the situation in, for instance, the UK and France. After the death of Eugene Ejike Obiora (of Nigerian background) in Trondheim in January 2007,5 and an incident later the same year when two ambulance officers refused to pick up a black man who had suffered a severe head injury (the ‘Ali case’ 2007), activist and general media attention to racism in Norway increased. The Trondheim police invited British police officers to teach them about race and racism. The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson report on institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police in London were seen as cases from which the Norwegian police could learn. Anti-racist activism in Norway has been inspired by, and largely modelled upon, UK and US activism. And in Norway, as in the UK and the US, some of the main activists early on were immigrants themselves, many of them international students.

Anti-racist and inclusion initiatives in Norwegian sport The Norwegian Sport Association and Olympic Committee’s current Sport Policy document (2007–2011) is entitled ‘An open and inclusive sport’.6 The main goals for an open and inclusive sport in the period 2007–2011 are listed as (p. 3):



Give better opportunities to more children, youth and adults; prioritise groups that do not feel comfortable in sport clubs; respect human dignity and secure equal opportunities for growth and development; increase volunteer engagement and local creation of values.


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In the 25-page document, ethnicity is referred to explicitly once, under the heading ‘Tolerance and Equity’, where it is stated that ‘There is zero tolerance for discrimination and harassment regardless of gender, ethnic background, life view, sexual orientation and disability’. Lesbians, gays and bi-sexuals are mentioned specifically as a central group in a separate paragraph, and one chapter is devoted to sport for disabled persons. In a separate value document entitled ‘Sport’s Basic Values’, the vision for Norwegian sport is proclaimed to be ‘sport for all.’ The organisation’s work is to be marked by voluntariness, democracy, loyalty and equity, and all sporting activity is to build on the basic values of pleasure, community, health and honesty. In this document ethnicity is also explicitly referred to once in the goal ‘Norwegian sport shall focus on community between groups and club members that cross boundaries of gender, age, level of ability and social or ethnic background’. In these two major policy documents issued by the highest administrative body of Norwegian sport, there are no references to any effort to increase the number of ethnic minority persons in governing and administrative bodies, or to specific programmes devoted to anti-racism. The policy document does not set up clear measurable goals for achieving open and inclusive sport, but leaves the fulfilment of policy to the various federations and to Norwegian sport in general. Compared to the situation in the UK, where a Racial Equality Charter was introduced in 2000 (Long et al., 2005), Norway has a way to go. The singling out of groups other than ethnic/racial minorities when it comes to special attention reflects a long trend in Norwegian sport of relating discrimination and integration issues to gender and disability. Norway has a strong record in the Paralympics, and had until recently a separate organisation working with sport for disabled persons. Recognised internationally as a country marked by state feminism, Norway also has a comparatively strong record on the integration of women in sport, and on research on female athletes. In recent years, Norwegian gender researchers have increasingly focussed on sexuality as a field of gender research. In the late 1990s, however, initiatives against racism and/or in favour of the inclusion of ethnic minorities were undertaken in some Norwegian sport federations and teams. The Norwegian Football Federation (NFF), the largest federation in the Norwegian Sport Association, devoted a (half) position to ‘integration concerns’, centrally. The officer in charge of integration issues created a representative board of volunteers to develop an action plan on discrimination by ethnicity, religion, race, sexuality and disability. The country-wide tournament ‘Colourful Football’ for children and youth was another initiative towards integration. In 2000, the Norwegian People’s Aid, which had for worked for some time on anti-racist teaching in other contexts, together with the athletes’ labour union in Norway (NISO), started a ‘Red Card against Racism’ campaign in Norway. Both the integration officer of the NFF and those who took the initiative to launch the Red Card


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campaign were inspired by developments in British football. The integration officer had a history as a Chelsea fan and had first observed racism against black players on the stands at English clubs in the late 1970s. He brought this experience to Norway and started anti-racist work when leader of the fan club at an Oslo club (Vålerenga) in the early 1990s. The initiative for the Red Card Against Racism campaign came after a Norwegian People’s Aid worker had been to a United Against Racism conference in Dublin in 1998. Having learnt about the English version of the Red Card campaign, he talked to his colleagues, who came up with the idea of co-operation with the recently established labour organisation for athletes in Norway, NISO. NISO went actively to work recruiting elite footballers as ambassadors for the campaign. They used Norwegian professional players in the British Premier League to sell the campaign to players in the Norwegian elite league. The Red Card Against Racism campaign is still running in Norwegian football, and has also been adopted by other sports, such as handball and ice hockey. The campaign’s main activities have been teaching school children about discrimination and racism, and showing the red card before selected elite series football matches. Since 2005, the campaign has published four issues of a magazine, presenting actual cases and events. They also offer courses to coaches in children’s and youth football. In basketball, the organisation ‘New Page’, now led by a well-known ethnic minority player, started in the same year as the new Norwegian basketball league BLNO, in 2000. This organisation works with children and youth in trouble, and many of their clients are children and young people of minority ethnic background in Norway’s major cities. It is now a national organisation, with branches in most large Norwegian cities. The leader of New Page sees its philosophy as very different from that of the Red Card campaign (interview, March 2003): And this is what I mean by being responsible. As an elite athlete you walk into the sports hall, and there is a kid 14–15 years old watching the match. I can’t be sure he looks up to me, but I have a responsibility to this kid. When it comes to how important I am as role model for minority youth, the most important thing for them is to see someone who has managed his life, and that’s the reason why you need to be down to earth and accessible. The leader distinguishes what he calls ‘close role models’ from the ‘distant role models’ exemplified when famous players show the red card before televised football matches. In his view, such distant role models have far less effect on the integration of ethnic minorities and anti-racist attitudes than role models working directly, or closely, with minority ethnic youth themselves. The New Page initiative, the NFF’s integration campaigns and development of an action plan against discrimination in football, as well as




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the Red Card against racism campaign, are well-known and well-publicised campaigns in Norwegian sport. One of the leaders of the Red Card campaign argued that the campaign had been effective, since fewer instances of racism were reported from 2000 to 2003 (Red Card, 2009: 19). Televised matches with players showing the red card against racism will probably raise general awareness of the theme of racism in society and in sport, but there is yet no scientific evaluation of the success of this campaign and other initiatives in combating racism in Norwegian sport. Action plans in the UK, although they have not achieved all their goals (Long et al., 2005), have not yet found their way into Norwegian sports.

Interpretations of racism and of the presence of racism in sport Material from the Norwegian Red Card Against Racism campaign shows that there were a few non-white players in Norway as early as the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Red Card, 2009: 12). It was not until 1987, however, that a case of racial harassment from supporters (racial chanting and bananathrowing) received media coverage, and the club in question was fined centrally by NFF. The player exposed to racism, Caleb Francis, retired from football for two years. He came back to football later, and in an interview with the Red Card Against Racism Magazine, he admitted that ‘there have been sporadic cases of racism against me in my football career.’ Francis also said that although he had previously experienced sporadic racism, he had never reported it. The existing policy is that racism in the two top male divisions and the top female division must be reported directly to the central secretariat of the NFF, while racism in the lower divisions and in children/youth football must be reported to regional administrations. When I asked to see the material on racism reported centrally to the NFF (from the person in charge at the NFF and the public relations officer) in 2005, I was not given access to it. The answer to my request was ‘a few charges’. The Red Card against racism campaign, however, registered seven cases of racism in elite sport in 2004, including ice-hockey. The dominant racism episode in 2004 was the racial chanting and spitting from supporters of SK Brann against Robbie Russell, professional North American player for the west coast club Sogndal, in May. This episode made the front pages and headlines of the sport sections in the Norwegian press in the days following. Russell was interviewed and revealed his shock over being exposed to blatant racism in Norway. Interviews in many major newspapers revealed a complex message. In dagbledet, on 10 May 2004 (pp. 28–29), Russell said he had never before been exposed to this in Norway. But he also said: ‘Ask any coloured player in the elite series. They have all experienced episodes of racism’. There are different interpretations of racism in play here. Whereas Russell might never previously have been


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exposed to open racial harassment, he was obviously familiar with racism in other senses of the word. He also thought that all coloured players in the top league had similar experiences, a statement he repeated in an interview given to the first issue of the Red Card Against Racism campaign magazine, published a year after the racist episode. Russell’s first claim that he had never previously been exposed to racism in Norway accords with the dominant message of the non-white top athletes I interviewed in 2002 and 2003. They also said they never had been directly exposed to racism in sport themselves, but that they knew of other, less successful players, and athletes in other sports, who had suffered from racism. Their general interpretation was typically that there was less explicit racism in Norway than in other countries. Some athletes used terms like ‘hidden racism’ and ‘everyday racism’ to explain how racism worked in Norway. This finding accords with research from the UK (Back et al., 2001; Garland and Rowe, 2001; Long, 2000), which finds that few non-white British players report racism or say they have experienced it. Rationalisation of racism among players (‘worse elsewhere’, ‘not experienced myself, but know of others who have’), and reluctance to report it, interact with the rationalisation of racism in clubs. In the Robbie Russell case a complaint was sent to the NFF, SK Brann was fined, and the fan club expelled one supporter from the football ground for the rest of the season. In the local newspaper, Bergens Tidende, and in interviews with club officials, it was stressed that this episode was an exception in an otherwise racism-free club milieu. A leading sport journalist stated that: There is no reason to believe that Bataljonen, the Brann supporters’ club, has suddenly been infiltrated by racists and neo-Nazis, or that football as such is a breeding ground or a place where such destructive elements are allowed a free hand. A day after the event, it is more likely that this was a one-off, an episode representing thoughtlessness more than a planned or even, perhaps, politically motivated action. Both Brann and the Football Administration have reacted promptly. Bataljonen has, together with the sports club, examined the case and made their decisions. It seems that what we have seen here has more to do with lack of manners than with goal-directed and evil-minded racist harassment. (Comment by Knut Langeland, Bergens Tidende, 11 May 2004: 21) Such rationalisation, that a club cannot be racist according to definitions of racism that follow the old biological doctrine, is not unusual. In Norwegian sport, and also in other arenas, episodes of racism that might show a village or a specific institution in a bad light are often explained as exceptional cases. Another message from several athletes is that their sporting excellence since childhood had probably shielded them from racism and exclusion. The few who openly admit they have been exposed to racism,




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such as Caleb Francis, referred to earlier, and John Carew, who has been exposed to racism abroad, have argued that racism made them tougher and harder, and turned them into better human beings (see Red Card, 2009). A white studies perspective focussing on the subtle codes of inclusion and exclusion in everyday interaction gives a more context-sensitive perspective on racism in sporting arenas (Long and Hylton, 2002; Andersson, 2008;). Examples of less explicit racism, like the ‘implicit normative racism’ (Back et al., 2001) or the ‘elusive racism’ (Garland and Rowe, 2001) found in British football, also come to the surface in interviews with white and non-white sport leaders, athletes and coaches, and in media portrayals in Norway. As described earlier, the non-white athletes themselves tended to argue that racism in Norway was less blatant than elsewhere, and that racism in Norway could better be described as ‘hidden’ or everyday racism. Among white informants, a typical comment in the debate about minority athletes as role-models for children and youth was that minority ethnic elite athletes had to be fluent in the Norwegian language in order to be good role models. A major finding from Norwegian media research is that minority ethnic individuals are more positively framed in sport sections than in other sections of newspapers (Lindstad and Fjeldstad, 2005). My data complement this finding, showing that specific demands may still be made on minority athletes with regard to their position as role-models (fluency in the Norwegian language), and that some of the minority athletes were critical of how journalists had framed them as minority athletes in media articles. The word ‘racism’, however, was not usually attached to such criticism, nor to accounts of the more subtle codes of belonging in white-dominated settings. Two of the athletes from track and field thought they were seen by others as ‘too concerned about their colour and their black identities’. These athletes had been explicit about their colour and minority background in the media. One of them started a debate about the word ‘negro’ in a major Norwegian tabloid in 2000 and had, together with other non-white elite athletes, served as a figurehead for a campaign against racism by the organisation Afrikan Youth in Norway. The other athlete had often jokingly referred to his ‘half-whiteness’ in media interviews. Other athletes (white and non-white) and leaders in the same sport confirmed the image of these athletes as ‘playing with their blackness’ in interviews. One white athlete, for example, told me in a somewhat offended tone that ‘they [pointing at two black athletes] want the best of both worlds’ (interview, May 2002). There are not many references in my data to experiences of racism in sport, but many references to racism outside sport, both in general terms and with regard to specific episodes. Some of the athletes had experienced explicit racist episodes outside the sporting context, from being hunted by violent racists to racial taunting and more subtle, coded, remarks. All, however, had experienced generalised negative talk about immigrants in their


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presence. A typical account of what may be labelled indirect racism is the experience of white friends or acquaintances harassing immigrants and visible minority groups in openly derogatary terms in their presence, while stressing that ‘you are a real Norwegian, not like them’, shortly afterwards. Such episodes are experienced as degrading, and they often invoke feelings of solidarity with other people of visible minority background in Norway. The otherwise clear-cut divide between racism in sport and racism in society becomes blurred, and inter-contextual references may also inform one’s experience as non-white in white-dominated sport settings.

Global integration in the nation: a bright future? It was common for the non-white athletes I interviewed to have internationally recognised non-white athletes as role-models. Many also had friends and colleagues of similar background abroad. As I have already stated, few said they had experienced racism in their sport, but many thought there was racism in Norway. When looking to the future, the athletes (more than white journalists, coaches and leaders) tended to be sceptical about whether their position as stars in the Norwegian media would make it easier for visible minorities in sport and elsewhere. They thought it was important that some visible minority athletes were portrayed in a positive way, but were more ambivalent about whether this would help others: I feel that the perspective of people in general will continue, regardless of how people contribute and do positive things in sport. There seems to be this general attitude in society when it comes to foreigners or immigrants – with regard to criminality and such things ... That there will always be immigrants behind this and that. I think this kind of prejudice will always be out there, even when people do well in sports. (Interview, April 2003) Long (2000) remarks on how black professional athletes playing in the German league may be able to relax from racism a bit when playing in the UK. Here, the underlying argument is that there is more racism in the German league than in the English. One could add that the awareness of racism against ethnic/racial minorities in public debate and, more generally, in policy development influences both the labelling and the reporting of episodes in sport as ‘racist’. When Robbie Russell was exposed to racism in the Norwegian elite series in 2004, he pointed out his North American background in press interviews. In Dagbledet, 10 May 2004 (pp. 28–29) he said ‘I am an African–American and will always fight against racism.’ In Bergens Tidende, 10 May 2004 (p. 22) he said ‘I am from the USA and ought to be used to racism. But it never happened when playing football at home’. Russell’s clear message, and his willingness to go public with his vulnerability, was a




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breakthrough for the Norwegian debate about racism in sport. Before 2004, there had been few reports of racism in Norwegian sport, and in 2004 the Red Card campaign registered seven cases of racism in elite sport. In June the same year, the daily leader of a mid-Norway regional football administration stated in Trønder-Avisa (19 June 2004: 26): ‘This spring we have had more such cases than in the last three to four years put together. Racism is an increasing problem, a development we dislike’. The leader told the journalist that in the course of the first six months of 2004, six or seven cases of racist character had been reported to his regional administration. All the cases related to children’s and youth football. The Red Card against Racism campaign and the integration work of the NFF started in 2000. In the years 2000–2003 it seems (according to my interviews) that there were fewer reports about racism than in earlier years. After the Russell case, however, more cases were recorded in both elite and children’s/youth football. It might be, as the leader of the regional football administration argues, that the increase in registered cases actually reflects an increase in racism in football. Just as likely, however, is that the Russell case made others dare to go public with charges of racism. Research from the UK (Long, 2000) and my interviews from Norway indicate that many athletes decide not to report implicit racist incidents to the football authorities. Russell’s frankness in the many interviews he gave about the event may thus be an example of how a professional foreign athlete with background from a country where the racism debate has long traditions, opens a space for non-white athletes to report racism in a country more marked by racial avoidance than the USA. For Norwegian athletes, travelling to training camps and competitions abroad provided more or alternative ways of being a non-white athlete on the global scene. Training in South Africa, for instance, made some of my informants see that being black in Norway is different from being black in South Africa. They also experienced being seen as foreign blacks and Europeans there. Racial configurations, or in Winant’s terminology, racial formations, vary according to national/regional history and the centrality of race as a dimension of social inequality and difference. Europe is, as Goldberg and Lentin point out, marked by a long history of racial avoidance. In Germany, for instance, a country that has definitely debated its Nazi racial past, racism towards visible minorities seems hard to accept as a contemporary trait of society. In Europe, racial avoidance is closely attached to national identity and nationalism. Sport, and specifically elite sport, is among the most relevant markers of national identity. And gold medals in the traditional winter sports have been the trademark of Norwegian sport excellence internationally, both before and after the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. The emergence of non-white star athletes in sports like football and especially track and field, challenge the hitherto taken-for-granted link between whiteness and sporting excellence. Elite athletes, regardless of colour, tend to be


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celebrated as expressions of national excellence. Ruth Kasyrie, who led the Norwegian team at the Olympic stadium in Bejing, was used, and seen, as a symbol for Norwegian sports inclusion policy and its ‘sports for all’ message. Having lived in Norway for ten years at the time of the Bejing Olympics, she also proclaimed to the press that she felt very Norwegian. And Jaysuma Saidi N’Dure, who gained his Norwegian citizenship faster than most other immigrants, was praised by the press as very Norwegian until a doping case came up and he became Norwegian–Gambian. Race and racism researchers often claim that race has gone from being un-coded to coded in the contemporary world, especially in the United States. In saying this, they draw attention to the fact that racism has become more sophisticated, using different means from before, and that ethnicity and race is more often implicitly referred to in public debate and politics. In debates about poverty in the US, for example, it is common knowledge that blacks and other minority groups suffer more frequently from poverty than whites. This knowledge is coded, in that its references to ethnic/racial issues are strong, without having to be referred to explicitly. In Norway, race has been, and still is, a taboo term associated with the Nazi regime, euthanasia and phrenology. Ethnicity, religion and culture – and Lentin and Goldberg claim this is typical for Europe – are the preferred markers of difference in the Norwegian societal debate on immigration and integration. The same applies to sport: Norwegian sport has imported anti-racist and inclusion policy models from abroad, and integration of ethnic minority youth has been a central issue for some years. Major worries here have been that immigrant parents do not follow up on the voluntary work needed in civil society organisations, and that girls are not allowed to follow ‘normal’ dress codes in sport. It is my impression that it is less concrete work and worry about racism, exclusion of minority ethnic individuals in white-dominated teams and clubs, and more about white leadership in all Norwegian sport organisations (apart from sports such as cricket and field hockey). Race is coded, but racialisation works as an undercurrent, structuring identity ascription and the rationalisation of racism in sport clubs as well as among many athletes themselves.

Notes 1. Adresseavisen, 15 August 2008, interview with the president of the Olympic Committee, Tove Paule. 2. The research was a three-year project funded by the Norwegian Research Council’s programme for sport and civil society research. 3. According to census data accessed at www.ssb.no, on 1 April 2009. 4. Not his real name. 5. Obiora died after a neck grip by one of the four police officers called on (by staff) to remove him from a municipal social benefit office when he wanted money to buy his son a birthday gift. The case has been explored twice by the internal




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examination committee of the Norwegian police (SEFO), and the police officers found not guilty of Obiora’s death. After Obiora’s death an activist network with members from many Norwegian cities was set up on the internet. They have held many demonstrations and raise money to sue the police officers in the Norwegian civil court. 6. Accessed on-line at http://www.idrett.no/t2.aspx?p=66791, on 3 September 2009.


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11 Carmel Foley, Tracy Taylor and Hazel Maxwell

Introduction In early twenty-first century Australia, the traditions of Anglo privilege and exclusivity that remained intransigent throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are increasingly being challenged. Australia is a culturally diverse nation, and many traditional Australian institutions have been forced to reconsider who their stakeholders are, and adapt to the changing population base in order to be viable and sustainable and to appeal to a wider range of individuals and community groups. This chapter examines the policies, processes and practices of Australian sport in relation to anti-racism, cultural diversity, social cohesion and gender equity. The intersecting challenges of racism and sexism in Australian sport are explored here in the context of the experiences of a historically marginalised population: women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. A conceptualisation of sport as a social vehicle capable of challenging racism and supporting cultural diversity has been often posited in recent years (McNamara, 1998; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), 2007). The potential of sport for expressing and promoting diversity, celebrating cultural difference, challenging stereotypes and enhancing intercultural relations has also been identified by a number of Australian academics working in this area (Taylor, 2001; Hanlon and Coleman, 2006; Cortis et al., 2007). Evidence of government institutions supporting these views can be seen across a range of recent government policy documents. ‘Shaping Up: A Review of Commonwealth Involvement in Sport and Recreation in Australia’ states that ‘[in] a multicultural society such as Australia, sport is an important mechanism for bringing diverse groups closer together’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 1999: 55). ‘Enriching the Lives of All Australians Through Sport’ suggested: ‘sport provides a strong and continuous thread through Australia’s diverse and widespread population [and] is a binding element in our social and cultural fabric’ (Australian Sports Commission, 2006: 2). It has also been claimed that sport


Gender and Cultural Diversity in Australian Sport

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can provide the social glue which binds communities and creates a broader, more unified society (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), 2007). These statements emphasise the potential role of sport in developing social capital and social cohesion. Social capital exists in the networks of solidarity and cooperation among members of groups. Despite the fact that is often referred to in a positive way, social capital has a dark side. Privileged groups use social capital to defend social distinctions and social power, to maintain privilege. Group members can be sanctioned if they violate the norms of their group, possibly by exclusion. In a more positive sense, social capital predisposes people to cooperate, trust, understand and empathise – ‘to treat each other as fellow citizens, rather than as strangers, competitors, or potential enemies’ (Arai and Pedlar, 2003: 193), promoting networks and intercultural understanding in communities. Social capital also benefits sporting organisations, lifting the profile of organisations in local communities and attracting greater numbers of volunteers (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), 2007). Despite much policy, social and attitudinal change, racism and sexism in sport are still too often a reality. Patterns of exclusion around gender, race and ethnicity remain evident and incidents of discrimination and vilification continue. The anticipation of racist and sexist attitudes and responses, and associated feelings of not belonging, can act as major barriers to sport participation. In this chapter we argue that the racist and sexist attitudes that have prevailed in the wider Australian community since European settlement have been reflected and reinforced in sporting institutions and sport culture. We also argue that sport can provide a vehicle for change. In the following sections we provide, as a contextual foundation, an overview of immigration and migration policy and debate since European settlement in 1788, then move to contemporary initiatives, including a report on the sporting experiences of women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We subsequently present a theoretical conceptualisation of the marginalisation of women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and detail some strategies currently employed by government and sporting organisations in Australia for overcoming some of the problems that these women experience.

A history of Australian immigration and migration policy This section highlights the salient immigration and racism debates and policies that have shaped Australian migration patterns and community responses, and complementary historical occurrences in Australian sport. First and foremost, it is acknowledged that Aborigines have lived in Australia for at least 40 millennia and they remained relatively undisturbed until the eighteenth century, when many Europeans began to arrive on the country’s


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shores. In recognition of the unique situation of indigenous Australians we defer to Chapter 7, ‘Race matters in Australian sport’ by Colin Tatz, so our chapter limits discussions to non-Aboriginal minority ethnic communities and post-white settlement history. From 1788 onwards the ethnic composition of the migrating peoples has underpinned the development of colonial Australian society and identity. This complex interaction of race, religion and culture shaped social, economic and political structures and, patently, has provided the basis for the country’s contemporary sporting environment. The influence of generations of successive governments’ immigration policies, community debates and political decisions on the Australian socio-cultural psyche is undeniable. For the purposes of providing a simplified historical context, we identify three evolving phases of migration. The first period was one of expected and legislated assimilation. This cultural integration approach dominated policy and practice from the early days of white settlement until the mid-1960s. Notably, one of the first acts of legislation passed by the new Commonwealth of Australia was the Immigration Restriction Act, 1901. The underlying principle of this Act was deeply embedded in the so-called ‘White’ Australia policy, in which all immigration was predicated on a preference for British migrants. Non-Europeans, and particularly people from Asian countries, were effectively excluded, as it was considered that such races had less potential to assimilate. However, in the years after the Second World War, the federal government actively pursued widespread immigration as a reaction to the ‘populate or perish’ mandate. This was primarily because immigrants provided fundamental labour for Australia’s reconstruction and industrialisation, and human capital for building the nation’s defence. The second phase, from the mid-1960s to 1973, can be viewed as the post-‘White Australia policy’ period, and was defined by a recognition that the large numbers of migrants coming into Australia, especially those whose first language was not English, required more direct assistance to be ‘Australians’. Thus, a proactive policy of acculturation and assimilation was accompanied by increases in funding for migrant assistance and welfare. However, it was still expected that new arrivals would eventually culturally integrate into the host culture. The final phase, introduced by the adoption of multiculturalism in 1973, was complemented by a shift to placing value on, and embracing, ethnic diversity. In this third phase, minority ethnic groups are encouraged to maintain their language and heritage. However, as with many settler nations, while Australia is multicultural, racisms that include ‘Anglo-Celtic cultural dominance, intolerance of diversity, antagonism towards some cultural groups and xenophobia’ are still present (Forrest and Dunn, 2007: 700). The historical context and place of Australian sport in relation to its ethnicity, race and cultural milieu is strongly tied to these tides of




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immigration. Initially, the dominant elite of the early white settlers introduced civic underpinnings based on established institutional links with Britain, demonstrated by the introduction and reinforcement of cultural continuity through sports such as cricket and horseracing. As the nation developed, the creation of myths and memories around sport evolved to reshape, yet retain, the relationship with England. Sports such as cricket moved from being defined by their early allegiance to England and deference to all things English, to the creation of an intense rivalry and desire to beat all English sporting teams. This was followed by the appropriation of cultural symbols that signified Australian uniqueness, evidenced in the emergence of a new sport, Australian Rules football. Australian Rules football had three attributes for successfully attracting diverse ethnic groups (Stewart et al., 1997). First, it was the most prominent sport played in the suburbs where newly arrived migrants settled; second, some clubs developed links with particular ethnic communities; and third, it provided financial rewards at the elite level and its players became role models for the young males from their communities. Many of the players who succeeded also had to overcome racist taunts and labelling (Booth and Tatz, 2000). The massive wave of post-Second World War immigration was accompanied by the appropriation of sporting cultures and traditions from the incoming minority ethnic groups and the creation of ‘new’ sports. For example, soccer shifted from its initial English-controlled roots to a sport administered and played by large numbers of European Australians, before being wrested from the ‘ethnic minorities’ into the mainstream in the early 2000s. Conversely, non-English sports such as handball and bocce were introduced by minority ethnic groups into the host society but are still mainly played within non-Anglo ethnic communities. While there is no common migration experience, in society in general or in sports in particular, the process of immigration and settlement has had vastly different consequences for men and women. From the first days of colonisation women were discouraged from active participation. Female spectators were present in small numbers at the popular sports of horseracing and prize fights but such behaviour was not viewed as socially acceptable for women (Waterhouse, 1995). Across all spheres of colonial life, including sports, officers and gentlemen were largely motivated in their actions by commitment to the principles of paternalism. The lower orders participated mainly out of defiance to authority and engaged in ‘illegal’ sports, while women of all classes were restrained in their participation by English cultural values and institutions (Waterhouse, 1995). Early formal sports organisations excluded women from participation and sports were used to reinforce the divide between men and women (Crotty, 2000). By the first decade of the twentieth century, women were ‘permitted’ to play sports that were perceived as social pastimes, that did not require great


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physical exertion and that allowed them to retain decorum and femininity. For example, golf was seen to have redeeming feminine virtues (Haig-Muir, 1998). By the 1920s and 1930s women were participating in sports that ranged from the earlier socially accepted sports of tennis, golf, and swimming to the new pursuits of basketball, hockey and cycling. Women began to form their own sports associations and take control of the administration of their sports but they still had to battle continually for physical space and social acceptance (Booth and Tatz, 2000). The 1950s signalled a period of rapid change for women in both society and sports that continued to the 1960s. It was a ‘golden era’ for Australian women in the Olympics and at the 1956 Melbourne Games, women won seven of Australia’s thirteen gold medals (Booth and Tatz, 2000). Women were still, however, allowed only limited access to facilities, as evidenced in golf, where many golf clubs did not allow women to play at weekends until the 1970s (Stoddart, 1994). It was not until the 1980s that women were allowed to engage in rescue work and competitions in surf life saving (Booth, 1994). In male-dominated sports such as boxing, cricket, the football codes, horseracing, soccer, surfing, wrestling and weightlifting, women continued to be marginalised in many other ways, and the battle has not yet been won against gender-based inequities in sport. However, the tide does appear to be turning with respect to some domains of gender relations. For example, there is now a ready willingness within the media to expose the ‘boys will be boys’ culture of rugby league and Australian football, and a backlash against the ‘legitimate’ spoils of fame and groupies. In May 2009 the National Rugby League chief executive David Gallop publicly declared that the league would not tolerate clubs or players that failed to show respect for women. While far from ideal, there has at least been movement in the right direction and some acknowledgment of the issue. Within this gendered historical account, it is notable that women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds were located on the extreme margins of sports in Australia throughout the twentieth century to a much greater extent than males from similar backgrounds (Stoddart, 1994). In the 1940s and 1950s many newly arrived migrant groups formed ethnic-specific sport clubs and soon came to dominate sports such as football (soccer), but the competitions that emerged and provided participants with the space and place to express their identity were almost exclusively male. This domination led to the game being labelled as ‘wogball’ until recently. Soccer is now called ‘Football’, and is a growing sport that is expected to challenge the other football codes of rugby union, rugby league and Australian Rules football. This historical overview provides a political framework which illustrates the gendered and ethnicised ways in which Australians have traditionally experienced sport. Empirical evidence of the marginalisation of women




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from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds is presented in the following section.

Women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds consistently report difficulties participating in sport, particularly when the sports offered in Australia are different from those offered in their country of origin (Cortis et al., 2007). Research has found that women tend to feel alienated, any desire to participate being overshadowed by language difficulties and the fear of rejection (Taylor, 2004). Common and recurring themes relating to these women’s experiences in sport have been identified (Cortis et al., 2007). These include inhibitors such as time constraints, family responsibilities, the lack of appropriate facilities and programmes, the absence of companions to attend with, a lack of finances, social and family pressures, negative school sport experiences, and a lack of information about sporting opportunities (Taylor, 2001; Hanlon and Coleman, 2006). Socio-cultural barriers to participation experienced by women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in Australian sport have also been linked to the way that sport is organised and delivered (Cortis et al., 2007). These constraints may include feeling different, standing out or having difficulties in communicating in mainstream social contexts, needing to meet family and cultural requirements, the need for female-only coaches or sporting environments and flexible dress requirements. These constraints are often indirect and not manifested in the form of direct racism. Previous studies have noted that women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in Australia did not generally feel directly discriminated against in sport and recreation settings, but they found formal leisure activities did not recognise their cultural requirements or were not welcoming, thus making it difficult for them to participate (Taylor and Toohey, 2002; Taylor, 2004). In particular, some Muslim women in Australia have reported the need for sporting activities to be structured around religious requirements, such as having no males present, having activities appropriately timed, easing uniform or clothing restrictions and ensuring venues are appropriate (Taylor and Toohey, 2002). It has also been reported that some women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds preferred to take part in sporting activities with people of the same background rather than participating in formally organised sport and recreation outside their ethnic community. This preference may be misinterpreted as hostility or a lack of desire to conform to mainstream values and practices (Taylor and Toohey, 2002), and may militate against efforts to facilitate broader social inclusion (Cortis et al., 2007).


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Conceptualising marginalisation Like Australian immigration and race policies, the dominant cultural patterning in Australia that to varying degrees centres the ‘white male’ and marginalises other social groups has roots in Australia’s colonial past. According to Mackie (1996), the Englishmen who colonised Australia brought with them a set of assumptions and thought patterns that continue to influence our thinking today: a sexist and ethnocentric viewpoint that, self-servingly, placed the ‘English gentleman’ at the pinnacle of global civilisation (and the ‘Australian Aboriginal woman’ at the bottom). According to these thought patterns, industrialised Western culture was seen as ‘scientific’, ‘progressive’ and superior to non-Western cultures, which were considered ‘primitive’. Men were considered to be more ‘rational’ and dominant in cultural and public affairs than women, who were considered to be more ‘emotional’ and closer to nature. These thought patterns remain embedded in our culture and encourage Australians to see persons who are other than ‘Western, white males’ as different, less desirable, inferior, possibly dangerous, and sometimes scarcely human (Mackie, 1996). Perhaps the most insidious consequence of this dominant cultural view is that people who are devalued by these thought patterns are also subject to the same cultural view and may be at risk of believing that they are inferior on the basis of gender or ethnicity (Mackie, 1996). One author is reminded of a story told by a friend of Sri Lankan ancestry who, as a young Australian child, tried to scrub her skin white each night as she sat in the bath. Recent research has established that racist attitudes associated with ethnocentrism, in which ‘Australianness’ is tightly linked with Anglo culture and privilege, continue to prevail (Forrest and Dunn, 2007). Specific and recent manifestations of racism include the ‘Cronulla riots’, a violent clash between Anglo and Muslim Australians which occurred in a beachside suburb south of Sydney, and the televised protests of Camden residents against a proposed Muslim school in their local government area, south-west of Sydney. Both incidents have unearthed significant anti-Muslim sentiment amongst Anglo-dominant social groups in Australia. In contemporary Australia we live in culturally diverse communities, and there is ample opportunity to view the world outside the ethnocentric and sexist cultural blinkers of the past. We are, arguably, becoming more reflexive as a society, particularly in areas such as literature and the arts, where the stories and voices of a diverse cross-section of Australians


The presence of subtle socio-cultural constraints has meant that women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have often felt marginalised in sporting settings. The next section provides a theoretical framework for understanding the marginalised sporting experiences of such women.


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are heard, respected and celebrated. A quick look at the sports pages of any major Australian newspaper, however, will support the view that the ‘Western, white male’ continues to occupy the central ground in the cultural playground of Australian sport. Using the sports section of The Australian – the country’s only national newspaper – (20 July 2009) as a snapshot example we can verify that stories and photos of white male cricketers, footballers and coaches dominate the pages. Men of non-white ethnicities receive somewhat less coverage – there is a photo of a non-white footballer, and a back page story on the golfer Tiger Woods. There is one mention of women’s sport (a small insert from AAP on the Australian women’s hockey team). There is no coverage of sportswomen from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Of course, the fact that they are not depicted in newspapers does not stop women from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds from participating in sport, whether as players, coaches, administrators or other officials. The lack of media coverage is, however, evidence of the marginalisation and oppression of certain social groups in Australia when it comes to sport. Other research confirms that the sporting needs of women from non-Anglo backgrounds are sidelined by mainstream providers (Taylor and Toohey, 2001). Taylor’s (2004) research into netball, for example, revealed that women from non-Anglo backgrounds do not feel that they ‘fit’ comfortably into the Anglo-dominated sporting culture of netball. Ethnocentrism was transported to Australia in the colonial era and remains evident in contemporary society in a variety of guises and levels of intensity (Taylor and Toohey, 2001; Forrest and Dunn 2007). Even among educated groups, unconscious aversion to some social groups and the normative gaze continue to oppress in informal ways (Young, 1990; Forrest and Dunn, 2007). Many Anglo Australians, particularly those who are well educated, voice respect for the value of multiculturalism, but we can question whether the rhetoric has led to real connections, friendships and cultural sensitivity between people from the different ethnic groups. Feminist movements and anti-discrimination legislation have not eliminated gender-based inequalities either. Women are under-represented in the boardrooms of most organisations in Australia, including those of our national sporting bodies. There is mounting evidence of a gross lack of respect for women among some players in the football codes. Aggressive hegemonic masculinities based upon ‘superiority’ over women are reinforced in many sporting environments and bring men power and status (Wearing, 1998; Sparkes et al., 2007). Dominant discourses construct sport as necessarily aggressive, with a high value placed upon characteristics such as strength and speed. While there are women who are stronger and faster than men, at the elite level men are stronger and faster (due, predominantly, to differences in physiology). Elite female sportswomen tend to receive less media coverage, prize money, sponsorship and other support, as their


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performance is deemed to be inferior to that of their male counterparts. Sports that also require artistry and elegance – such as gymnastics, diving, synchronised swimming and ice skating – appear to be valued in Australian culture only once every four years, when the possibility of winning a medal at the Olympic Games stirs nationalist pride. Women’s soccer is growing rapidly in popularity and many players report enjoying the fast, aggressive and physical nature of the game (Ledlin, 2009). Some feminists are critical of women adopting masculine traits like aggression (cited in Wearing, 1998: 111). Others note that women are rewriting the ‘male rules’ of the game. Ledlin’s (2009) study of amateur women soccer players found that many women insist on playing with friends rather than being graded into teams based upon ability. It is argued that women are less likely than men to reach their full potential in sport, due to gender and ethnic stereotyping (Wearing, 1998). However, sporting spaces also provide opportunities for women to resist ‘domination of the self and inferiorised subjectivities’ (Wearing, 1998: 146). Many women experience a sense of empowerment from sports participation, including an increase in self-confidence and a new and exciting awareness of bodily power (Wearing, 1998: 110). Newly arrived young immigrants to Australia have reported that sports participation has brought them out of isolation, provided opportunities for friendships to develop, and given them hope for the future. In Australia we pride ourselves on egalitarianism, yet claims to impartiality tend to serve the interests of social groups who are already privileged. Research into the sporting experiences of women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds highlights injustices and inequities in Australian sport (Taylor and Toohey, 2001; Taylor, 2004) where the embedded cultural tendencies towards sexism and ethnocentrism intersect. Sporting administrators and policy-makers interested in addressing inequities in Australian sport have systematically focussed on the values, strengths and needs of women (and men) from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, centring these groups in their thinking, plans and strategies for the future of their sports. Social justice is about a fair distribution of material goods but also goes beyond material goods to things like respect, opportunity, power and honour (Young, 1990). The need to address these factors has been recognised by many sport and social policy-makers in Australia. This recognition stems from a growing body of empirical research that highlights the potential of sport participation to promote cultural diversity, gender equity and social inclusion. Debate continues as to whether programmes, policies and other initiatives should aim at incorporating women from culturally and linguistically diverse communities into existing sporting structures or promoting wider change in sporting institutions and cultures to enable these women to participate on their own terms (Cortis et al., 2007). The next section provides




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an overview of strategies that have been trialled and/or recommended by sporting organisations and policy-makers in Australia.

In a bid to overcome both explicit and implicit barriers to sports participation a number of changes have been made to Australian sport policy in recent years. Sports organisations, sporting codes, government and nongovernment sporting agencies and human rights institutions have recognised the need to combat racism and prejudice within Australian sport in order to give everyone in the community opportunities to benefit from participation in the sporting activities of their choice. Strategies, policies and programmes have been developed to support the sporting needs of all women. These have, in turn, resulted in a range of initiatives and interventions promoting inclusive practices. One approach is the provision of information about opportunities and promotion of sporting and recreational activities and issues (Cortis et al., 2007). Womensport and the Centre for Multicultural Youth Issues in Victoria publish resources which include translated programme resources, tips for sports providers, information for coaches and newly arrived young people about how to engage women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Personal invitations, word of mouth and community radio have proved to be effective strategies (VicHealth, 2000). Strategies such as distributing information about how to access activities at places of worship, specialty shops, community centres and retirement villages with culturally and linguistically diverse populations have also been proposed (Taylor and Toohey, 1998). Examples of good practice in successful inclusion programs are initiatives that stress the importance of peer support and peer education as effective strategies to increase, establish and maintain activity programs for migrant communities (Islamic Women’s Association of Queensland Incorporation, 2003; Cortis et al., 2007). The importance of having an instructor from the same cultural background is also mentioned as a strategy for facilitating sport participation for migrant women (VicHealth, 2000; Cortis et al., 2007). Cross-cultural training and education within sporting organisations about the benefits of cultural diversity and the extension of programmes and interventions to support participation have also been recommended (Centre for Culture Ethnicity and Health, 2006). In 2006 a comprehensive study, ‘What’s the Score’, examining cultural diversity and racism in Australian sport, was undertaken by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC, 2007). The study included an audit of existing strategies adopted by sporting organisations in order to develop an inclusive, non-discriminatory culture within sport for


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Table 11.1 A sample from the ‘What’s the Score’ project of Australian sporting organisations that offer programmes to combat racism and/or sexism Organisation

Project/s

Description

Australian Football League (AFL)

Multicultural Football Programme

Programme encouraging migrant and refugee communities to access AFL, promoting anti-racism in various media

Australian Rugby Union (ARU)

National Education Programme

Educational programme exploring the significance and value of diverse role models in rugby union

Athletics Australia

Sports Leadership Grant Programme

Programme providing grants for rural and remote women

Basketball Australia

Multicultural Young Women’s Basketball League New Arrivals Basketball Go For Your Life

Programmes providing subsidies for basketball participation fees and a welcoming environment including multicultural development officers

Football Federation Australia (FFA)

Refugee Youth Soccer Development Program Onside Soccer

Programmes for developing soccer in new refugee communities and in disadvantaged communities

National Rugby League (NRL)

Voices of Australia Cross-Cultural Awareness Programme

Programmes tackling racism issues and providing cross-cultural awareness training for players and club members

Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA)

On The Same Wave

Programme providing support to young Australians of all backgrounds to engage in surf life saving around Australia

Netball Australia

Cross-cultural training programs

Strategies and checklists for clubs to encourage participation of women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, for example encouraging flexibility to accommodate religious beliefs and establishing ethnic teams within existing structures


players, spectators and the broader viewing public; and to identify potential new approaches in order to increase participation by non-traditional sporting groups. The HREOC study included seventeen Australian sports. The selection criteria for the sports included participation numbers, profile, past issues with racism and involvement in cross-cultural awareness training. The study also encompassed federal and state government agencies,


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human rights and equal opportunity agencies and seven non-government sporting organisations. Table 11.1 provides a snapshot of some of the more innovative and dynamic projects operating in Australian sport. These strategies and programmes help national sport organisations to deliver sport to a more diverse Australian population. All of the sporting organisations surveyed had a range of member protection polices and codes of conduct in place to address concerns and complaints of discrimination, harassment and other inappropriate behaviour. Individual sporting organisations were found to employ their own educational anti-racism programmes such as the Bouncing Racism out of Sport booklet and DVD developed by Cricket Victoria, Football Victoria and Netball Victoria in partnership with the Department of Victorian Communities (launched in 2003). The HREOC report recommended that these policies be audited in order to ensure the inclusion of adequate processes for effective complaint handling and policies to deal with racial abuse by spectators. Most national sporting bodies work with people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds as role models to raise cultural awareness and to demonstrate respect. The Australian Sports Commission includes a Women and Sport Unit which aims to foster inclusive practices in sport and to promote equity and respect for women and girls in all aspects of sport. These innovative projects offer unique opportunities to encourage sport participation and value the involvement of diverse populations. Sporting organisations that provide a welcoming, inclusive atmosphere have a greater chance of attracting participants from a diverse range of backgrounds (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), 2007). The report concluded that NSOs that did not have existing dedicated sports programmes or development officers for culturally and linguistically diverse communities should consider introducing them. The report also recommended using role models within sport to show the importance of standing up to racism (HREOC, 2007). On a national level, two important strategies being implemented include the Australian Sports Commission’s (ASC) ‘Harassment-free Sport’ strategy (launched in 1998) and the online training programme ‘Play by the Rules’ (launched in 2001). After an evaluation of the Harassment-free Sport strategy in 2004 it was realigned to support a greater number of educational and awareness initiatives for national sporting organisations. A significant element of both initiatives is the innovative way in which they are delivered, through a combination of state and territory sport and recreation departments and equal opportunity and anti-discrimination commissions. This involved consultation, co-operation and collaboration between the key stakeholders, which include the sporting organisations and federal, state


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and territory government agencies. This comprehensive approach gives the projects wider reach. In 1999 the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) established the ‘Living in Harmony’ programme which assists incorporated, not-for-profit organisations such as sporting bodies and schools with funding for projects that aim to promote Australian values and mutual obligation, engage the whole community and address misunderstanding and intolerance at the community level. Harmony day projects have been developed by a number of sporting organisations. The Australian Football League, Cricket Australia, Netball Australia, Surf Life Saving Australia, Tennis Australia, and the National Rugby League have all been official partners. These projects have been successful in raising public awareness of the potential of sport to promote community harmony. The ASC established the ‘All Australian Sporting Initiative’ in 2006, to increase participation in sport amongst children from culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Sydney. The large numbers participating have indicated the community’s need for and commitment to this project. The ASC has also funded the ‘Women’s Sport Leadership Grants’ which provide funding and support for women to seek accredited training and development in coaching, officiating, governance and management. One of the priority areas for these grants is women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The prioritisation of these projects indicates the importance as well as the continued demand for these types of initiatives within the Australian community. This can be illustrated through the continued support by the ASC and the longevity of the Women’s Sport Leadership Grants over an eight year period. In 2009 funding for these grants was increased to $500,000 and 132 individual women were supported (Australian Sports Commission, 2009). NSW Sport and Recreation set up the ‘WimSWIM’ program in 2004. This programme provides learn-to-swim and leisure swimming programmes for girls and women of all ages. The programme resulted from a demand for women-only swimming sessions which could not be satisfied by swimming provision at local swimming pools. In the WimSWIM programme all the swimming lessons are taught by accredited female swimming instructors in a fully enclosed, indoor, private, heated pool. This programme has been successful in engaging women and girls from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, particularly Muslim women. There is also a Sportrage programme provided by NSW Sport and Recreation that provides sporting clubs with educational and promotional resources to address abusive behaviour. Both projects have drawn considerable public support and have addressed previously unmet needs.




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The ‘On The Same Wave’ project (which followed incidents of racism, discrimination and harassment culminating in the December 2005 ‘Cronulla riots’) was designed to foster community harmony and social cohesion after these had broken down on Sydney’s beaches during the disturbances. The project was specifically designed to increase the participation of culturally and linguistically diverse individuals in life saving and water safety activities in order to improve racial and community harmony on Australian beaches. On the Same Wave introduced a greater diversity of participants to the activities of Australian Surf Life Saving and challenged the iconic stereotype of the blond, blue eyed, muscular, male life saver, as images of a young Muslim womanengaged in a surf life saver role were broadcast worldwide. The project launched an image of Surf Life Saving Australia as an inclusive organisation reflective of the diverse Australian community. Two significant and tangible outcomes in terms of equality and cultural diversity have been achieved as a result of Surf Life Saving Australia’s On the Same Wave project. These include the development of the ‘Burqini’, a modest red and yellow surf life saving uniform suitable for hijab-wearing women, and the qualification of the first Muslim woman surf life saver. The programme received positive national and international media coverage and allowed Australia to share a model of good practice around the world. These successful outcomes illustrate that when gender sensitivities and religious differences are recognised and the necessary cultural adaptations or accommodations are made by the sport concerned, cultural diversity can be embraced and sport can be used to facilitate social cohesion. This occurs when a sporting organisation develops inter-ethnic trust through providing opportunities for positive sporting engagement. Additionally, social and cultural networks start to develop between migrant and mainstream Australian communities. Social capital begins to be produced and (re)produced as individuals and communities engage in culturally and religiously appropriate sports programmes and projects. Development of social capital involving inter-ethnic trust facilitates cross-cultural understanding and in turn reduces racism and discrimination in sport and in the broader society.

Conclusion Australia has a political and cultural history of privileging the Western, white male and marginalising all others, including women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. This chapter has illustrated that the institution of sport has both reinforced and reflected these historic patterns of privilege and marginalisation, but that sport has also demonstrated the potential to address these issues through the adoption of a social inclusion


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agenda. Furthermore, research presented here suggests that sport can help build community harmony, social capital and social cohesion and assist with settlement and migration issues. The benefits of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in sport and building social capital have been widely acknowledged by Australian sporting organisations, government bodies, human rights organisations and nongovernment organisations involved in the delivery of sport. Social capital (used in its most positive sense) predisposes people to cooperate, trust, understand and care about each other – ‘to treat each other as fellow citizens, rather than as strangers, competitors, or potential enemies’ (Arai and Pedlar, 2003: 193). Social capital benefits sporting organisations, lifting the profile of organisations in local communities and attracting greater numbers of volunteers (HREOC, 2007). A diverse membership has the potential to stimulate social networking among diverse cultural groups within sporting organisations and the wider community. It should be noted, however, that an increase in cultural diversity within a community can sometimes have the effect of reducing social capital, particularly levels of trust, altruism, and community cooperation (Putnam, 2007). Social capital is underpinned by the formation of trust (Arai and Pedlar, 2003; Putnam, 2007). In the context of sporting organisations trust can be thought about in two ways: interpersonal trust and abstract trust (Arai and Pedlar, 2003). Sporting organisations, the mass media and education play a role in the creation of abstract trust; that is, teaching the art of co-operation and an understanding of abstract ideas such as citizenship, trust, fairness and equality (Arai and Pedlar, 2003). Many of the projects mentioned in this chapter have played an important role in developing abstract trust in Australian communities. ‘Harmony Day’ (developed in Australian schools and many sporting organisations) and ‘On the Same Wave’ (initiated by the Australian government in partnership with Surf Life Saving Australia) are particularly good examples of the development of abstract trust. As the name suggests, interpersonal trust develops between people linked to the organisation (players, coaches, volunteers, administrators, officials and members of the wider community). Organisations that provide members with order, decision-making capacity, authority based on principle rather than person, and group norms that allow members and authority to influence each other reciprocally (McMillan, 1996) are providing an optimal environment for the development of interpersonal trust. This chapter has reported a groundswell of policies, programmes and other initiatives that have been put in place to combat social exclusion and to build co-operation, trust, networks, empathy and intercultural understanding in Australian sporting communities. Evidence to be collected over




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coming decades will determine whether these strategies have been effective in reducing marginalisation and providing more opportunities, respect, power and honour for women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We will know that we have succeeded when all Australians have the opportunity to feel that they are welcome and belong in the Australian sporting landscape.


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Part IV


Challenges


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12 Paul Thomas

Introduction This chapter focuses on an anti-racism campaign by a group of fans at Leeds United, and the cultural change it helped to bring about amongst the club’s match-going fans. In describing the campaign and highlighting some of the key issues involved , it hopes to suggest points for consideration by those working not only against racism across a variety of sporting situations, but also against anti-racism generally. In doing so, the chapter is not offering the Leeds fans’ campaign as a ‘model’ of good practice, as there were plenty of limitations and mistakes involved. Indeed, other anti-racist football academic commentators have questioned the Leeds campaign’s focus on the role of organised racist groups, and the consequent style and tone of our campaign materials (Back et al., 2001). These criticisms are analysed and discussed below. Nevertheless, Leeds Fans United Against Racism and Fascism (LFUARAF) was one of the pioneering, locally-based initiatives that have helped transform English football over the past twenty years to a situation where, although there is still much to do, as the work of Kick it Out shows, many of the more positive facets of multicultural Britain are now on display in the stands as well as on the pitch. I do not subscribe to the view that the sharp decline of racist behaviour in and around English football grounds was an inevitable result of the increasingly multicultural make-up both of teams and of society as a whole; the significant lurch towards xenophobic intolerance in previously liberal states such as the Netherlands and Denmark argues against the cosy inevitability of anti-racist success. The real progress against racism in English football has been hard-won, sometimes through struggle and conflict, and the aim here is to identify key components and issues within that progress at one particular club. To this end, background detail of Leeds United and of the LFUARAF campaign are followed by discussions of key themes and issues.


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Few teams polarise opinion amongst English football fans more than Leeds United, yet until the early 1960s, Leeds had never been a significant force. In a city arguably dominated by rugby league, United had mostly languished in the English second division. This all changed when Don Revie became manager, and within ten years of their promotion to the top division in 1964, Leeds had become the most famous and arguably the most loathed team in the land. Two League championships and three other cup triumphs were achieved, but Leeds also finished League runner-up five times, and lost a number of high profile cup finals and semi-finals. The most famous of these defeats came in the European Cup Final of 1975 against Bayern Munich, when controversial refereeing decisions proved the prelude to rioting by fans that resulted in a European ban. Many neutrals rejoiced in these defeats, as Leeds were seen as the epitome of the ruthless and hard-faced new era of professional football (Hamilton, 2007). The catchphrase ‘dirty, dirty Leeds’ stuck, as highlighted in the feature film adaptation of The Damned United (Peace, 2008), but many others also acknowledged that Leeds, with their stable team nurtured by Revie and their fierce collective spirit, were a great team. Just as the team rose, so it fell, with the departure of Revie to the England job, and retirement of the key personnel leading to a decline culminating in relegation in 1982. Leeds also polarised opinion off the pitch. The 1970s were the high point of English football hooliganism, and Leeds were also top contenders there. Additionally, as the 1970s went on, racism and fascist agitation became an increasingly overt element of English fan behaviour, reflecting wider social issues and conflicts (Gilroy, 2002; Solomos, 2003). Large-scale racist chanting inside the ground and fascist paper sales outside the ground became a regular feature at Leeds United’s Elland Road ground in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as it did at many other English clubs. Anti-racist campaigners such as the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) attempted to respond, but the racism continued unabated at Elland Road throughout the 1980s. A former Guardian sports journalist recalled the racist reality of his trips to Elland Road as a young fan in the 1980s: The most shocking aspect was really just the fact of it, the unashamed, unpunished, almost unremarkable mass public display. And the revelling in it. (Varley, 1999: 136)


Leeds, Leeds, Leeds!

Varley goes on to describe in detail the vicious racist abuse directed at Mickey Brown, a young Black player for Shrewsbury in a game in the 1986–7 season. At that time, the then-dominant fascist organisation the National Front (NF) had a visible presence at Elland Road and at many other football grounds, selling their newspaper and youth magazine, Bulldog. In this


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pre-fanzine era, Bulldog was arguably a (racist) trailblazer for later (non/ anti-racist) fanzines (both inspired by the DIY approach of punk rock music fanzines of the late 1970s), in its jokey and foul-mouthed style, with the ‘Racist League’ being a particularly popular feature amongst racist football fans. Here, racist fans at different clubs attempted to move up the ‘league’ through overt, regular racist chants and taunts. Leeds were always near the top, competing with Newcastle, Aston Villa, Chelsea and West Ham. While organised racist chanting and fascist agitation was more obvious at some clubs than others, racism was rife across English football, reflecting the reality of day-to-day popular racism, whereby the tabloid newspapers had spent the 1970s creating a moral panic around ‘Black Muggers’ (Hall et al., 1978), and where Margaret Thatcher had ridden to power talking about people feeling ‘rather swamped’ by ‘coloured immigration’ (Solomos, 2003). Alongside this was the issue of local histories and cultures (Hill, 2001). Leeds has a long history of racial tension and fascist agitation going back to the significant Jewish immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the attempt of Mosley’s fascist Black Shirts to exploit this tension ending in violent disturbances close to the Elland Road ground in September 1936, just weeks before the seminal ‘Battle of Cable Street’ (Thurlow, 1987). Modern fascist groups also attempted to exploit tension around the significant Asian and African–Caribbean immigration to Leeds and Yorkshire from the 1950s onwards. In football, as in society, far-right groups were not causing racism, but in football, and especially at clubs like Leeds United, they were very actively fuelling and encouraging racist behaviour, providing a real focus and identification for some young men, as the graffiti common in West Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s, Leeds Utd – NF, illustrated. It was in this context that a new, fan-led anti-racist initiative began in 1987, kicked off by match-going Leeds fans who were also involved in wider antiracist work. Uniting under the banner of the Leeds Trades Union Council, and subsequently as Leeds Fans United against Racism and Fascism, the campaign aimed to change the culture at Elland Road decisively by overtly challenging both racist behaviour amongst fans and the fascist political agitation in and around the ground. This was done initially through the distribution of anti-racist stickers, leaflets and fixture calendars, and subsequently through the regular anti-racist fanzine Marching Altogether, which was published several times a season. The campaign continued until 1995, when it was judged to have done its job. Subsequently, a number of the key activists have been involved in the national Football Supporters Association, particularly in its international work, which has attempted to combat racism and xenophobia and create a more positive and inclusive atmosphere around England international games. The campaign years were tumultuous, with campaign members assaulted and threatened by fascist activists in the early stages, but decisive victory, in our own terms, was achieved. On the pitch,


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Leeds United went from the bottom of the second division in 1988 to being Champions of England in 1992. Dull, it was not!

The universal English disgust at the racist abuse faced by England’s Black players during the November 2004 friendly international in Spain, and the support from all parts of the English game for Kick It Out’s annual antiracist events suggests that that progress to an anti-racist consensus has been smooth and conflict-free for English football. The experience of our campaign was that this was far from the case, as the people and institutions holding real power over the experiences of ordinary football fans had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards progress. Arguably this has been, and may still be, the case in English football more generally. The Introduction to this book outlined the grim, racist reality that had prevailed at Elland Road for a decade or more prior to the start of our campaign in 1987. However, the initial response to the new campaign from the organisations and people holding power over this situation was far from welcoming. Having given West Yorkshire Police polite notice that a group of anti-racist fans would be handing out leaflets in a peaceful and organised manner at a future match, the police themselves, the club and the local media all immediately swung into action to dissuade us, and to portray the anti-racists as the trouble-makers. The Yorkshire Evening Post (YEP) carried a story titled ‘Political violence feared at matches’ in late September, as the campaign prepared for the first leaflet session in October. The officer responsible for match-day policing at Elland Road where racism and organised fascist activity had been a reality for many years was quoted as saying: My worry would be that the actions of this group will provoke a reaction from the National Front. It could prove a busy day for us when we are keeping rival fans apart. (YEP, 26 September 1987: 5) This attitude – that talking about racism is a much greater problem than racism itself – was clearly shared by Leeds United. Following a highly successful first leafleting session, with a positive reaction from fans, the club secretary was quoted as saying that he had ‘no idea’ who was behind the leaflet (‘Club hits at “fake” leaflets’, YEP 26 October 1987: 3) and threatening legal action for our use of the club badge on the leaflet, even though pirate merchandisers had been selling material with the same badge with impunity for years. They also refused to meet to discuss the issue, only agreeing after considerable political pressure from the Labour MP for Leeds Central. Leeds United questioned our analysis of a major problem and challenged us to produce evidence, even though in a match not long before, several


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of Aston Villa’s Black players were pelted with bananas in the pre-match warm-up. The result was the publication of our report Terror on our Terraces (Leeds Trades Council, 1988) in March 1988, which received substantial coverage in national media (‘Fascist racist and violent – club branded a breeding ground for the NF thugs’, Daily Mirror, 29 March 1988: 11). The national media coverage was fiercely critical of the racist reality of Elland Road and the lack of action against it: ‘Exactly the widespread and critical publicity the club was anxious to avoid. The conspiracy of silence was completely broken’ (Varley, 1999: 149). As Leeds fans, we had no wish to drag our club through the mud, or to confirm the lazy stereotypes outsiders held about Leeds United or its city, but we felt the club had given us no choice through their refusal to recognise what was happening, or to show moral courage. This was emphasised by the fact that none of the evidence contained in Terror on our Terraces was new, and had all been culled from previous media reports. That included the findings of the Popplewell Enquiry into rioting at the Birmingham City against Leeds match in May 1985, where a teenage boy died after a wall collapsed. Popplewell identified racist behaviour and fascist organisation as key elements of the very serious and prolonged disorder, including whole groups of Leeds hooligans parading in Nazi armbands, but this evidence had been overlooked by the attention given to the Bradford City football ground fire on the same day, where over 50 people died. The evidence in Terror on our Terraces also included details of several racist attacks, clearly highlighting the use of match days as a contact hub for fascist agitators. Coupled with details from participant observation of racist chanting, and of regular fascist paper-sales and recruitment at match days, the Terror on Our Terraces report and the significant media reaction to it proved to be a watershed for Leeds United. At the preceding and subsequent matches, Club anti-racist leaflets signed by manager Billy Bremner and all the players were waiting for fans at the turnstiles: the club had been forced to reconsider their position through an overt external challenge, with change coming through conflict rather than through consensus. The overtly political approach of our campaign also included meetings with key councillors within the Labour-controlled city council. Leeds Council actually owned the Elland Road ground and as local residents we wanted to know why they were not taking action against racism in the ground. The support of the local Trades Union Council and local MPs meant we were soon talking to the Deputy Council Leader, and the local councillors on the Club’s board, who had previously not seemed to notice the racism, were suddenly threatening to ban racists from all council facilities! Similarly, the Police Commander so critical of our initiative suddenly ‘moved on to other duties’ and was replaced with a new commander, who immediately held a long and constructive meeting with the campaign, leading to a significantly changed police attitude on match days.




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The process analysed above highlights the highly political context of any sport fans campaigning against racism, suggesting the need for hard-nosed organisation and the willingness of fans to engage in overtly ‘political’ lobbying and media work if progress is to be achieved – dialogue with fellow fans alone is not enough. Indeed, there is arguably a parallel between our local campaign at Leeds and the wider national initiative, Let’s Kick Racism out of Football (now Kick It Out). Let’s Kick Racism out of Football was initiated from outside the game by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), and over the past 17 years its role has been to persuade football’s governing bodies at the national level and individual clubs at a local level to move forward on action against racism. This is clearly far from complete (see Chapter 12 of this book and Back et al., 2001), though it has developed to the point where English football is rightly seen as a model of good anti-racist practice by other European football authorities.

Reclaiming our club The description above of the depth and scale of the racist reality at Leeds United by the mid-1980s does suggest that the characterisation of Leeds by some outsiders as a ‘racist club’ with ‘racist fans’ was accurate. As matchgoing fans, we were well aware of the problems but did not accept the generalisation about our fans, or about their club and city. In starting our campaign, we believed that the clear majority of Leeds fans were against racism and intolerance but at the time did not feel able to do anything about the racism around them on match days. Our overriding aim of ‘reclaiming our club’ goes to the heart of effective anti-racist strategies, both in sport and in wider society, in what it assumes about people and how it approaches ‘community’. Ours was not the first attempt to overtly tackle racist behaviour and fascist organisation at Elland Road. The nationwide growth of the National Front and their increasingly assertive presence at Leeds United on match days in the mid to late 1970s was met by regular leafleting by the AntiNazi League (ANL), a coalition largely organised by the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) but containing well-intentioned anti-racists of all backgrounds. Nationally, the ANL and the parallel organisation Rock Against Racism (RAR) played important roles in combating the surge of popular support for the NF (Gilroy, 2002). RAR, in particular, in its live music events provided ‘spaces’ for young people of different ethnic backgrounds to come together and experience both anti-racist unity and some cultural synthesis (Gilroy, 2002). At that time, however, there was no parallel national movement aimed at football, although individual managers like Brian Clough and Jack Charlton gave messages of support to the ANL.


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The result was that at Elland Road, the well-meaning ANL leafletters were largely outsiders – not Leeds, or even football, fans – and they were not familiar or comfortable with the culture and history of the club and place. This was reflected in their somewhat problematic assertions about ‘kicking the Nazis out of football’ when the anti-racists clearly were not part of football themselves. This limited the impact they could have, and they also faced real intimidation from far-right activists and racist fans. Additionally, the NF showed real doggedness, consistently leafleting and selling papers year after year, whereas the national decision of the SWP to downgrade the ANL in favour of other ‘struggles’ handed the initiative to the fascists. The implicit message here, rightly or wrongly, was that Leeds fans were not a ‘community’ that the anti-racists were truly part of or felt long-term attachment to. The perception on both sides was that the far right had ‘won’ at Elland Road, leaving many anti-racists to fear or even demonise Leeds United and their fans, sometimes with good reason, given the use of Elland Road to recruit hooligans for involvement in racist and fascist activity. Many antiracist fans stayed away from the ground, and I was often viewed with frank surprise in the late 1980s when telling people that I went to Leeds games. This concept of having ‘lost’ could be applied to the city as a whole, with NF paper sales taking place every Saturday morning in the centre of Leeds, and the NF having office premises there. This experience left some clear lessons for the Leeds Fans United Against Racism and Fascism campaign. Some were applied in the early leafleting sessions of the 1987–8 season. The very first appearance at the ground involved taking almost one hundred campaign supporters in an organised convoy and leafleting in a disciplined and stewarded line. Many of these people were not Leeds fans, but committed anti-racists. Our intention in recruiting them for this activity was straightforward: we were not going to be intimidated or even attacked in the way ANL leafleters were in the 1970s, as we knew such a setback would strangle the campaign at birth. These numbers had a positive effect on our own confidence and a real effect on fans: one teenage fan wandered past saying, ‘**** me, see how many antiracists there are!’ The size of our anti-racist contingent clearly encouraged many ordinary fans, with countless coming up to take leaflets and thank us for doing it, whilst visibly agitating the much smaller group of fascist paper sellers. Another key point was that, although many of our campaign leafleters were active in different political groups, we made a strict condition of participation that no other political literature should be displayed or distributed; instead the focus was just on our leaflets, addressed to Leeds fans in accessible anti-racist language, with reference to recent team events. Interestingly, the Leeds SWP refused to participate in the campaign because they could not sell their own newspapers. While this approach was highly successful, limitations soon became apparent, as a minority of Leeds fans questioned the credibility of some




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leafleters. Watching one fan press a clearly uncomfortable non-Leeds supporting leafleter by asking, ‘So, who plays left-back for us then? You don’t know do you? Do you know the names of anyone in our team?’ convinced us we could go no further on that basis without falling into the same trap as the ANL of the 1970s. From then on, only Leeds fans took part in leafleting, and we focussed on our fanzine Marching Altogether (LFUARF, 1988), a free magazine clearly written by and for genuine fans. That the content of the fanzine could only have been written by regular match-goers, and that the same people were seen outside the ground distributing it time after time and could then be seen inside the ground were all crucial to the credibility we developed over time. That NF paper sellers did not go to the games, instead packing up and leaving before kick-off, was something that we highlighted to fans. This, and the evidence in the Terror on our Terraces report, helped us to show fans that the National Front and, implicitly, the ideas they stood for, were ‘outsiders’ with no interest in or commitment to Leeds United, and who were doing nothing but giving ‘us’ a bad reputation. We knew we were making progress with this strategy when we observed fans going out of their way to approach NF papersellers and say things like, ‘**** off, Hitler lovers!’. Cohen (1988) has identified how racism has often been deployed in closeknit British working class areas as a form of defence for a quasi-biological ‘community’ against ‘outsiders’, but that local identity has also been a real block historically to the spread of fascist political influence. Cohen identifies how such understandings of local autonomy and pride were deployed in East London in the 1930s to counter Mosley’s Black Shirts. Our campaign had a similar experience as we managed to portray fascist agitators and, by association, vocal racists, as ‘outsiders’ indifferent to the image and pride of ‘our’ club. Leeds fans have always had an ‘us against the world’ mentality, and our success in portraying racists and fascists as part of ‘them’ who wanted to damage Leeds and its fans was crucial to our overall success. Here, we squarely aimed at changing the ‘Leeds Utd NF’ reflex of many young fans into a contrary ‘Leeds Utd against NF’ position. The fact that we, and hence Leeds fans, received complimentary media coverage in a BBC TV Sports Night piece and a Channel Four documentary Great Britain United all helped to accentuate the positiveness of our campaign to the club. This was reinforced by dogged leafleting and fanzine production, financed only by donations from fans, season after season. The contrast with previous, unsuccessful approaches was highlighted around the end of our campaign in 1995–6, when the SWP had decided nationally to resuscitate the ANL as a ‘front’ campaign for their politics. ANL activists, led by a co-ordinator wearing an Arsenal baseball cap, appeared at our pub and asked us the way to the ground so they could go and leaflet! When they got there, they received an extremely negative reception from fans, as they had appeared from nowhere


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and their leaflets had nothing to do with Leeds United or football, instead berating people about ‘racists’. The contrast was instructive.

A frequent, and often justified, criticism of anti-racism is that it pays too much attention to fascist and organised racist groups, rather than the deeper and ‘taken for granted’ everyday reality of racism (Hall et al., 1978). Additionally, there has been concern in a football context that racism and hooliganism have been portrayed as synonymous: racists and violent hooligans have been seen as one and the same, as deviant ‘others’. Indeed, in discussing our campaign, Back et al., (2001: 188) suggest that: In order to mobilise support against a readily recognisable foe and win support from the authorities the report Terror on our Terraces unconsciously helped to establish the parameters of debate within the confines of the racist–hooligan couplet. They do go on to acknowledge why this approach may well have been needed, but while I do not agree, their thrust is understandable. The Terror on Our Terraces report and the associated media coverage described above was a calculated move to force Leeds United to acknowledge the problem and take action. This meant that, to a certain extent, we were tactically using the role of fascist groups within football violence to provoke more widespread antiracist actions. Similarly, it is clear that media portrayal of the rioting that forced the abandonment of the 1995 Ireland–England friendly international match in Dublin as inspired by far-right group Combat 18 both forced and enabled the Football Association to strengthen its commitment to the fledging Kick Racism campaign. Our subsequent priority as a campaign was not the club and its actions, but fan culture, as we believed that this was the only thing we could directly influence and change as fellow fans. Here, our significant focus was on fascist groups, their impact on racist behaviour and their links to violence around Leeds United in our fanzine and leaflets, because of the history outlined above. The racism of wider British society, arguably directly connected to colonialism and empire (Gilroy, 2002), provided the origins of the overt racist behaviour at Elland Road, but the long-term presence of groups like the NF was both an accelerant and a symbol, that presence making many ethnic minority and antiracist white fans feel that they could not go to Leeds United while fascists were there. Similarly, the violence quoted in Terror on Our Terraces was not the sort of pre-planned meet-up between consenting groups of rival hooligans that predominates today (Varley, 1999) but blatant and violent racial assaults, sometimes on entire groups or communities. For all these reasons,


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we had to focus on fascist groups, both because of their real impact, and because of the wider cultural battle that they had come to symbolise. In doing so, we recognised the need to engage with day-to-day racism among ‘law-abiding’ ordinary fans, with a number of us closely involved in anti-racist educational practice as teachers or youth and community workers. Close examination of the twenty-something issues of Marching Altogether suggests that there was indeed a clear engagement with mundane racial prejudice and discrimination. For instance, Issue 1 included an article detailing the British birth and education of many Black players of the time, directly engaging with popular prejudices about ‘foreigners’ and immigration: ‘This ... clearly shows that all this ‘send them back’ stuff is a complete load of crap’, (Marching Altogether No. 1). Importantly, through initiatives like our annual fixture calendars (which always had multi-racial images) we encouraged fans to put up overt pro-Leeds/anti-racist material at home and in their workplaces. As fans, we knew the impact that debates in the fanzine provoked, not only through letters and fans talking to us outside the ground, but because we could overhear conversations on the terraces. A frequently overheard conversation in the early stages was along the lines of ‘you can’t say that any more ...’ As it would be years before the club took similar proactive measures, such conversations represented the self-adjustment of fan cultures that we had helped to provoke. In trying to change the norms of fan culture from within, we were intentionally part of a wider fans’ movement. We drew support and inspiration from an informal, fledgling network of fans’ anti-racist campaigns, such as the ‘Geordies are Black and White’ campaign at Newcastle United and the ‘Foxes against Racism’ initiative at Leicester City. The wider ‘fanzine’ movement was growing rapidly across the country at the same time, with many fanzines taking overt positions against racism and fascism.1 When Saturday Comes emerged as a progressive national fanzine at a time when much national newspaper football coverage was poor and sometimes racist, while fanzines bloomed at every club. In establishing our fanzine Marching Altogether, we were part of that movement. What made us unique were two things: first, we were the only fanzine in the country that had been established to promote anti-racism; second, our fanzine was free. Although we knew some fans would pay for it, we wanted to communicate with those less likely to buy fanzines, especially younger fans who had been attracted to racist literature in the past. Within the fanzine, we overtly made connections with wider fans’ issues. This was not a tactic to ingratiate ourselves, but because we saw anti-racism as part of a wider perspective on the rights and responsibilities of football fans generally at a time when they were treated like scum by the police, football clubs and politicians – these were the people who gave us the appalling conditions and treatment that culminated in the Hillsborough disaster, then tried to blame fans themselves for it. Yes, there was unacceptable


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hooliganism, but collective punishment seemed to be the order of the day, and in those conditions all sorts of anti-social behaviour, including racism, were likely to flourish. The Football Supporters’ Association made us one of the first recipients of their ‘Services to Soccer’ award, a huge boost to our confidence. We petitioned Leeds fans against the identity cards for football fans proposed by Margaret Thatcher, we publicised the Hillsborough 96 Justice campaign and the culpability of South Yorkshire Police in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, and we highlighted the ‘safe standing’ campaign. In doing this, we were prepared to be overtly critical of the football authorities and our own club at the same time as pressuring them to do more about racism. These fans’ issues were not an add-on to campaigning against racism, they were part of a wider perspective that demanded dignity, equality and respect for all football fans and participants, and our credibility with fans grew because we were genuinely just as concerned with those issues as our core, founding issue.

Trusting the fans Both racism and wider fans’ issues were discussed in our fanzine in robust and irreverent ways, in keeping with the approach and appeal of fanzines generally. This included a great deal of humour, with one of our most effective and popular anti-racist features being the regular cartoon strip One Hundred and One Things to Do With a Nazi Skinhead (unsurprisingly, things never turned out well for the aforementioned racist ...). We saw this style as a contrast to the leaflets and newspapers of many anti-racist campaigns and political parties, which are often turgid and hectoring. As discussed above, we were well aware of the dangers of focussing on overt fascist groups (Back et al., 2001), but these cartoon strips were responding to what were realities for our fans. For a while, the cartoon became One Hundred and One Things to Do with a Ku Klux Klansman, because at a crucial away game there was considerable violence, some of it overtly racist, and the ringleaders were dressed in KKK gear. The cartoon aimed at isolating them and the ‘taken for granted’ racism they traded on. The cartoon had originally been focused on ‘Nazi Skinheads’ because that was who we had outside the ground selling racist newspapers on a regular basis. In doing this, we had the twin aims of avoiding ‘preaching’ or lecturing and of appealing to what we firmly believed was the majority of ‘ordinary decent fans’ (a phrase we used consistently), both of which raise wider issues around how to develop an anti-racism that is genuinely effective, both in sport and wider society. However, anti-racism has also had limitations and problematic features. This has been particularly evident when it has focussed on white working class young people and their communities, with some analysts detecting a ‘white backlash’ (Hewitt, 2005) from such communities. The evidence




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here is that significant numbers of white working class young people felt that they were being judged negatively and treated partially by anti-racist policies in schools, youth clubs and other settings that saw much of their language and behaviour as ‘racist’, and so punished it, while not applying the same scrutiny to people of different ethnic or social backgrounds. At the same time, anti-racism and multiculturalism appeared to ‘celebrate’ different ethnic minority cultures and religions whilst having nothing but criticism for the traditions and norms of old-established white working class communities (Hewitt, 2005). Much of this appeared to be as much a class-based condemnation, with middle class professionals quick to seize on the ‘racism’ of working class communities before retreating to their largely mono-cultural suburban enclaves. We were determined as a campaign not to appear to be judging or condemning ordinary fans, or being dismissive of the wider fan culture at Elland Road of which racism was then a part. That explains why, contrary to critiques (Back et al., 2001), we did not link racism and hooliganism, or have a problem with aggression towards the opposition, as we highlighted in our response to anti-semitic chanting in a match at Tottenham: Hate Spurs because they are flash, niggly, time-wasting Cockney bastards, but leave this Jewish shit out ... That’s what Belsen means – millions of innocent people dead. (Marching Altogether, No. 14, 1992) That also explains why we prioritised the wider fans’ issues. An associated criticism of ‘anti-racism’ was that, with its simplistic dichotomy of White = powerful, Black = oppressed, all white people were seen as inherently racist, ignorant and guilty, with the opposite implied for all non-white people (Bhavnani, 2001). As a campaign, we rejected this view as wrong and unnecessarily pessimistic. Instead, we believed (and continue to believe) that the majority of people are fair-minded and not sympathetic to crass racist prejudices. Our approach was to appeal to them and empower them by subtly and steadily influencing thinking and assumptions through fanzine content that made people both laugh and think. From that perspective, even fans who had engaged in racist chanting or comments on the terraces in the past should not necessarily be quickly condemned as ‘racists’. Indeed, in the early years of the campaign, we had a steady stream of fans coming up to us to say that they had joined in like sheep in the past and now realised that it was hurtful, stupid and wrong. Just as we did not accept the simplistic notion of ‘racist’ fans, so we were not under any illusions that fans were now ‘anti-racist’. Helping to create a norm of non-racist behaviour, and self-policing of it, amongst fans was our realistic goal within the context of a problematic wider society. Self-policing was a key value for our campaign and the wider fans’ movement that it was part of. In the years following the campaign’s end, we witnessed a number


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of incidents where racist comments or confrontations amongst fans were met on each occasion by a number of different fans telling the racist/s to shut up in no uncertain terms, as well as making formal complaints. The fact that Leeds United followed up with firm and effective action against the racists (I had personal experience of a racist I confronted and complained about whose season ticket was cancelled) was a bonus, with both aspects demonstrating the huge cultural change that had taken place at Elland Road over a decade. One of the limitations for anti-racism in wider society has been how it has been perceived as yet another way in which people in power, such as teachers, tell working class people what to do, think and how to behave (Cohen, 1988). For that reason, while firm action by clubs against racist behaviour is to be welcomed, there is the danger that ‘official’ anti-racism can be seen as another way of clubs telling fans what to do, so inviting some fans to test ‘authority’. ‘Attempts to impose further external controls on fan racism can all too easily be read as part of a perceived strategy to change the match-day atmosphere’ (Back et al., 2001: 198). We had an illustration of this in the early part of this century at a time when we were flying high in the Premier League with a vibrant, multicultural team and a positive fan atmosphere, with a clumsy and heavy-handed ‘Kick Racism’ video shown on the big screen every half-time to a mixture of profound indifference and bemusement. Similarly, the parade of anti-racist banners at Elland Road and other grounds as part of the annual ‘Kick Racism out of Football’ week is positive and is greeted by some polite applause but also with a ‘whatever’ attitude from some people who perceive ‘officialdom’ directing their thinking, this being an inevitable tension within ‘official’ anti-racism. The danger of clumsy anti-racism that is trying to impose an agenda, rather than responding to real issues amongst fans, was shown at Leeds by the Bowyer/Woodgate affair. In early 2000, just as Leeds United were making an audacious bid for the Premiership title and European glory, key young players Jonathon Woodgate and Lee Bowyer were involved in a violent assault on a young Asian student. It was clear that a vicious attack had taken place, but was it a racist assault? The fact that Bowyer had a previous racially-aggravated conviction meant that campaigners like the National Campaign for Civil Rights were talking about a ‘racial attack’ long before prosecutors had even considered the evidence. In a febrile atmosphere, Leeds fans divided. A small minority expressed their stupidity, and possibly racism, by lauding Bowyer at every opportunity; another minority booed, and the large majority said nothing, failing to clap Bowyer but keeping their counsel until they knew ‘the facts’. In this context, we were urged by national football campaigners to resurrect our campaign and leaflet ‘against racism’, but our response was that we did not know the facts about whether it was ‘racist’ or not, there had not been a racist response at the ground and that any leaflet would be counter-productive. In fact, prosecutors did not




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bring racially-aggravated charges, Woodgate was convicted and Bowyer was cleared.

Contrary to the belief of some critics, the campaign was not about us graciously helping Black players. Rather, our motivation was that our own values meant we could not and would not stand on the terraces and accept racism around us. We were not prepared to go home after games feeling dirty by association, and we were not prepared to be driven away from somewhere we were profoundly attached to. To me, as a season ticket holder now watching Leeds United play in the third division in 2009–10, the campaign described above feels as though it is in another time and another country. It is some years since there were any reports of racist chanting amongst Leeds fans. There is no guarantee that an occasional match-goer would not find themselves sitting next to a racist, but my experience is that any complaints about racist comments are dealt with promptly and seriously. The ex-Leeds player celebrated most regularly is the Black South African defender and hero, Lucas Radebe. Ironically, this changed atmosphere has not affected the open homophobia, with chanting regularly marring matches against Brighton, which is perceived to be a ‘gay’ town, a problem finally being recognised nationally by the Football Authorities (Kick Homophobia out of Football, The Guardian, 18 August 2009). Leeds United does reflect the continuing national problems of ethnic minority under-representation generally in the stands and the lack of Asian presence on the pitch (Bains and Johal, 1998), although the emergence of a young, Leeds-born Asian player, Harpal Singh, a few years ago created genuine excitement amongst many Leeds fans. His failure to break through did not alter the fact that many fans are keen to see Asian players, at a time when Ravi Bopara, Owais Shah and Monty Panesar are part of the England cricket squad. The culture of English football, of which racism was a part, has changed, largely for the better. Some of this is because some working class young men have been priced out, but racism has largely disappeared because fans and society have changed, and fans campaigns like ours at Leeds have played a positive role in that process.

Note


Conclusion: where we are now

1. Fanzines are unofficial magazines, written by and for ordinary fans, and reflecting the robust wit, wisdom and language of the terraces.


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It’s Not as Simple as Black and White: Challenging Racism in Professional Football through Locally Grounded Multi-agency Collaboration Steven Bradbury

Introduction This chapter will begin by considering the ways in which racisms and racialised exclusions have impinged upon and been generated by English football culture and their impact on patterns of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) participation across all levels of the English professional game. The chapter will also provide some contextual background on the shape and scope of national interventions designed to challenge racism in football and the efficacy of efforts to engage professional clubs in the idea and practice of anti-racism, in particular with respect to recent work around the Kick It Out Racial Equality Standard for Professional Clubs (KIO RES). The main section of the chapter will then examine the distinctly local application of this generic equality framework at Port Vale FC: a small professional football club in the English Midlands. My evaluation of this process will draw on my own substantial ethnographic experiences in leading a locally grounded multi-agency partnership specifically designed to assist in this process and help re-position Port Vale FC as a more accessible and culturally relevant local social institution. In doing so, I shall first outline the shifting local political and football landscape which stimulated and enabled the development of this intervention, before moving on to look in a little more detail at the following three main areas of focus: combating spectator racism and promoting a more inclusive match-day experience; building bridges between the club and local BME communities; and encouraging best racial equality practice within the operational infrastructure of the club. The chapter will conclude by offering some critical evaluation


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of the conceptual and practical strengths and limitations of multi-agency anti-racist interventions of this kind at the local level.

The issue of racism in professional football in England first became the subject of public and academic concern in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to overt forms of racist chanting from spectators targeting the growing number of black players in the game. Since this time, a number of writers have alluded to the multiplicity of ways in which racisms are manifest in football spectator culture, from more obvious forms of individual and orchestrated abuse which utilise a series of demeaning racial epithets (Cashmore, 1982; Williams, 1992; Holland,1995; Vasili, 2000), to patterns of cultural interchange and coded discourse that takes place across white spectator formations and which is often premised on shared racially structured antipathies and the celebration of homogenously white and racially closed birthplace localisms (Back et al., 1998; Robson, 2000; Nash, 2000). The connections between English football, the activities of hooligan ‘crews’ and the allure of racist politics and agendas has also been well documented, especially with regard to support for the national team, where right-wing ideologies have chimed most obviously with historically embedded ideas around ‘race’, nation, and cultural exclusivity (CCS, 1981; Williams, 1984; Garland and Rowe 2001; Back et al., 2001). More recently, an emergent body of academic work has alluded to the complexities of English spectator identities and conscious efforts to encourage and shape more inclusive forms of national spectatorship (Carrington, 1998b; Williams, 1999; Perryman, 1999, 2002). Despite the recent cultural reinvention of football and the increased marketability and appeal of the domestic game from the 1990s onwards, incorporating new, more diverse, middle class, female and family audiences, incidents of spectator racism have continued to exhibit some uneven but residual permanence. Large-scale survey research conducted around the turn of the century suggests that around one third of fans at all professional clubs in England had witnessed racism aimed at players during this period (Williams 2001a, 2001b). The more subtle and nuanced ethnographic work of Back et al., (1998, 2001) is also particularly instructive in identifying the incidence of more banal ‘respectable’ racism expressed by fans from a range of social backgrounds and across different sections of stadiums on match days. The historical legacy and continuation of racism of this kind has (along with issues of cost) contributed significantly to the relative paucity of BME fans attending live games. Most professional clubs at the elite level attract fewer than 2% of their home crowd from BME communities, despite the


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significant local residential presence of BME populations (Williams 2001a, 2001b; Bradbury, 2001a; IFC 2005). Beyond the increasingly corporate and modernising impulses that characterise the English professional game, there are also strong signs that a series of racially closed institutional practices, embedded within the dominant and largely unchallenged white hegemonic structures at clubs, has impacted disproportionately on the shape and scope of BME participation as players, coaches, managers and administrators. These practices are especially evident in narrow ‘traditional’ approaches to talent identification, which have historically failed to incorporate a range of sites and local settings in which young Asian players are present (Bains and Patel, 1995; Bains, 2006; Burdsey, 2004a) and in the inability and apparent unwillingness of some clubs to ‘open up’ a series of relatively closed recruitment practices which have sustained inequalities of access to administrative employment opportunities (Bradbury, 2001a). The invisible centredness of whiteness and the occlusion of any sense of inward gaze within the institutional core of professional clubs has arguably enabled dominant racialised assessments to lay responsibility for changing local practices firmly at the door of ‘problematised’ BME communities and placed them outside the local cultural catchment of clubs. The non-acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of racisms and their multiple applications at the individual and institutional level has also allowed clubs invariably to deny the existence of racism, to position themselves as ‘neutral arbiters’ in the fight against racism, and/or to apportion blame to anti-racism initiatives for importing racism into clubs where, as if in some kind of magical sporting and societal vacuum, it did not otherwise occur (Long, 2000). It is towards the shape, scope and efficacy of the work of national anti-racism interventions with professional clubs that this chapter now turns.

National anti-racism interventions and professional football in England The emergence of national interventions against racism in football first began in 1993, when the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), in conjunction with the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), launched the ‘Let’s Kick Racism out of Football’ campaign as a result of concerns about the ongoing incidence of racial abuse aimed at black players and the relative inaction of professional clubs and the sports governing bodies in this respect. Initially the campaign focused mainly on issues of spectator management and was supported by a high profile poster and magazine promotion. The developing national spread of the PFA Football in the Community (FIC) scheme also offered a potential conduit through which to address young people directly on issues of anti-racism (Williams and Taylor, 1994).


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The initial symbolic success of the campaign gradually attracted interest from national governing bodies in football and by the beginning of the 1995–6 season a new multi-agency grouping was established under the moniker ‘Advisory Group Against Racism and Intimidation’ (AGARI). Launched under the twin themes of ‘Let’s Kick Racism’ and ‘Respect All Fans’, AGARI had notably shifted focus to include anti-social behaviour: an agenda emanating from the concerns of the campaign’s new football governance partners to be seen to be busily cleansing the game of the social ills connected with spectator misbehaviour which had dogged the development and market potential of football in the recent past. A prescient critique of early national interventions suggested that the overly moralistic and distinctly national emphasis of campaigning largely ignored the specificities of local fan cultures and negated any sense of direct ownership of such campaigns by fans and their clubs (AGARI, 1996). The tendency of these early national campaigns to over-emphasise racist caricatures and the ‘racist/hooligan’ couplet also probably did little to challenge or disrupt the incidence of more banal and routine racism inherent within normative fan cultures (Back et al., 2001; Garland and Rowe, 2001). The shift from the ‘symbolic’ to more purposeful national anti-racist intervention was arguably cemented when the national Kick It Out (KIO) campaign was established in its present form in 1997. KIO is financially supported and ‘managed’ by the CRE (now the Equality and Human Rights Commission), the PFA and football’s governing bodies to co-ordinate and deliver a relatively sophisticated and ongoing national campaign against racism ‘on behalf of football’. The campaign has assumed a certain permanence over time and has become the central organising body for anti-racist activity within both the professional and amateur games, although it has no legislative powers and remains peripheral to the institutional decisionmaking policy powers of the football establishment. While KIO has offered a continuation of broad rhetorical and occasionally moralistic narratives and maintained a high media profile in this respect, it has, also, sought to engage educationalists at the local level through conscious attempts to link anti-racism with the wider citizenship agenda in schools (Kick It Out, 2002). The work of the national Show Racism the Red Card (SRTRC) campaign has arguably exercised a more consistent singular focus on work of this kind, and has since 1996 offered increasingly subtle rationalist pedagogical approaches to overcoming individual prejudice through the production of engaging educational resources targeting youth audiences. Central to the success and effectiveness of the SRTRC campaign over time has been its capacity to work closely with the FIC schemes of professional clubs, and local schools and to utilise professional footballers as anti-racist role models to this end. KIO differs markedly from the SRTRC campaign and prior national interventions in its wider ranging and more ambitious focus on addressing


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institutionalised barriers, which continue to have an impact on the shape of inclusion and exclusion in the game. In this respect, KIO has consistently sought to be pro-active in setting the agenda for anti-racism in the sport, both domestically and increasingly in a European context. Success here has been varied and has to some extent been conditional on managing emergent tensions between the broader egalitarian focus of the campaign and the distinctly corporatist agendas of some of its more conservative and financially powerful funding bodies. Nonetheless, central to the initial focus of KIO has been a much more intensive process of seeking to establish local anti-racist partnerships involving professional football clubs and key local ‘enablers’ such as local racial equality councils, local authorities, fan groups and BME community organisations. Work to establish localised initiatives of this kind was recommended by the Football Task Force (1998) and is considered essential to engendering effective locally grounded responses to the specificities of racisms embedded within specific fan cultures, and for helping professional clubs shift from positions of relative cultural isolation towards developing more ‘open’ relationships with ethnically diverse local populations. However, for KIO, progress in this area has been challenging, timeconsuming and poorly resourced. Between 1997 and 2002 KIO was able to facilitate the development of around 20 local anti-racist working groups involving professional clubs. While partnerships of this kind differed markedly in their scope and impact, few exhibited any longevity (Bradbury, 2002). Translating the rhetorical support of professional clubs for anti-racism into real and meaningful local action during this period was often made more difficult by prior fractious relationships between the economic agendas of professional clubs, the public service remit of local authority and voluntary service providers and the historical and cultural distance of BME communities from the aforementioned institutions. The relative nonresponse of many professional clubs towards implementing some of the most basic measures outlined by successive national anti-racism interventions or by the Football Task Force has been documented by a series of consecutive evaluation reports (McArdle and Lewis, 1997; Bradbury, 2001a; CRE, 2004; IFC, 2005). These reports also mentioned the lack of any critical engagement with – and some real cultural resistance to – ideas and practices related to ‘equity’ at a significant number of clubs, and highlighted the conceptual and practical difficulties faced by KIO in facilitating this process. Since 2004, KIO has noticeably refocused its efforts on this score through the development of the Kick It Out Racial Equality Standard for Professional Football Clubs (KIO RES): a framework document designed to guide and assist clubs to implement best racial equality practice across all levels of their operational infrastructure. The KIO RES is modelled on the Sporting Equals ‘Equality Standard’ (see Chapter 5 for a critical evaluation of the




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use of charters and standards to promote anti-racism in sports) and is intended in the first instance to formalise clubs’ rhetorical commitment to anti-racism by encouraging greater senior management level buy-in, and establishing some strategic clarity and inter-departmental cohesion around equity issues at clubs. Central to this process is a strong emphasis on issues of corporate responsibility, with particular regard to embedding more equitable employment and recruitment practices, the delivery of a series of actions encouraging targeted community outreach work and more inclusive marketing, to help engender a positive ‘brand perception’ of clubs within local communities. By the end of 2009, some five years after its official launch, a total of 32 (out of 92) ‘professional’ clubs had achieved the preliminary level of the KIO RES (or its successor, the generic Equality Standard), including 17 (out of 20) Premier League clubs. Eleven had gone on to achieve the intermediate level of the standard. While the Premier League has provided financial support, the Football League has not, and success is markedly less apparent in the lower echelons of league football, where just four (out of 48) professional clubs have achieved the most basic level of the KIO RES since 2004. The lack of financial support and only limited advocacy from the Football League may have disadvantaged many smaller professional football clubs in this respect. However, while the relative inaction of many clubs here is also underscored by some very real operational and infrastructural capacity issues, it is probably also the case that many clubs of this kind have exhibited little obvious commitment to engage in this process, nor have they exercised any sense of critical inward gaze at the way in which their normative everyday practices might continue to shape the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in negative ways for local BME communities. It is towards an examination of multi-agency efforts to assist in the implementation of the KIO RES at one such club that we now turn.

Port Vale FC and the Valiants Against Racism (VAR) campaign The development of VAR Port Vale FC is situated in Stoke-on-Trent. a medium sized post industrial city (pop: 240,000) in the English Midlands. Since the 1970s the city has experienced a gradual economic downturn affecting key industries of steelworking, coal-mining, and large scale pottery and earthenware manufacture. Many of the city’s local ward areas feature prominently on national measures of multiple deprivation, including those multi-ethnic inner city locales in which longstanding Pakistani and Black Caribbean, and newer, diverse, Black African, Iraqi and Kurdish asylum-seeker and refugee communities are resident and which, taken together, account for around 7% of the city’s population (Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, 2004). Stoke-on-Trent is also an area of acute racial tensions and strongly openly expressed racist


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sentiment. Casual conversational racism in private and public spaces is commonplace, and in recent years more organised racism and xenophobia has become increasingly manifest in the local political arena. Since 2001, the neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) has made significant electoral gains within local council governance, especially (but not exclusively) in economically deprived and predominantly white ‘sink’ estates, and has run a very close second in the city’s elected mayoral race on two consecutive occasions. The rise (and disproportionate national focus) of the BNP in the city has not gone uncontested, most notably through the efforts of the leftist alliance North Staffordshire Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (NORSCARF), and through the mobilisation of physical resistance by local Asian youth in some locales (Pegg, 2001). Local racial tensions have also been ‘played out’ within the predominantly white, male, and distinctly local, working class, spectator formations of Port Vale FC. During the 2000–1 season 29% of Vale fans reported witnessing racist abuse aimed at players (Williams, 2001b) and in the 2002–3 season around 200 Vale fans engaged in orchestrated racist chanting at a match in Oldham. Beyond some limited success in recruiting locally born black players, the club has exhibited little obvious cultural connection with local BME communities in terms of administrative employment or through its limited prior community focus with mainly white local cultural markets in the city and the surrounding locales of North Staffordshire. In recent years, the fiscal affairs of Port Vale FC have mirrored those of the failing local economy and by the close of the 2002–3 season, the club had drifted into financial administration. By the beginning of the 2003–4 season the club had acquired new owners through the efforts of a collective of local businessmen and the financial shareholder contribution of more than 500 club supporters. Importantly, the new directorial regime offered strong rhetorical support for shifting the shape of local relations from the markedly defensive silo mentality of the previous administration towards a much more democratic, transparent and community-orientated approach, which included intentions to develop a more progressive relationship with fans and an apparent openness to engagement with new multicultural markets. These new developments chimed positively with my own voluntary intentions and the organisational brief of the local Racial Equality Council (REC) and the national KIO campaign to offer practical support in helping tackle racism and engender much more positive relations between the club and local BME communities. My own experience on this score was not insignificant. I had recently completed a long-term academic study (Bradbury, 2002) examining racisms and the efficacy of anti-racist interventions in the English game, during which time I liaised extensively with the national Kick It Out campaign and focused the bulk of my ethnographic




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efforts on two progressive club-based anti-racism campaigns in Leicester (Foxes Against Racism) and Sheffield (Football Unites, Racism Divides), and was familiar with models of best anti-racist practice to this end. I was also a ‘third-generation’ Port Vale supporter with links to local organised fan groups and a strong familial and cultural connection to inner-city Stokeon-Trent. In autumn 2003, with the support of Kick It Out and the local REC, I chaired the first of several ‘open forum’ meetings at a local multicultural community centre near Port Vale FC. These initial meetings were essentially designed to evaluate local interest in – and shape the future agenda of – a potential initiative to tackle racism at Port Vale FC and involve the club more closely with its local BME communities. These meetings were well attended by representatives of the new ownership team at Port Vale FC, its FIC scheme, fan groups and a range of local BME community organisations. Facilitating this process was challenging. Between the historically polar positions of the club and local BME communities there was an apparent vacuum of knowledge and understanding of each other’s organisational operations and cultural practices. Attempts to shift debates towards more institutional processes of racial exclusion proved difficult for club representatives, especially its FIC scheme. There were also some barely concealed local tensions and competing community agendas within BME networks which needed to be managed and overcome in order to establish a unifying collectivist narrative outlining not just what it was we were all against, but also what it was we were all for, and how we might best achieve it. These challenges were not insurmountable. The clear and respected national ‘brand’ of KIO, the successful management of local community politics by the REC, my own organisational autonomy, and the significant goodwill and commitment of (almost) all partners all helped to quicken the pace. The group soon adopted the moniker ‘Valiants Against Racism’ (VAR) as a means of establishing a clear identity and brand association with Port Vale FC (The Valiants) and a forthright statement of intent against that to which we were collectively opposed (racism). VAR was officially launched in late 2003 at a high profile event at Port Vale FC where representatives from all membership organisations publicly ‘signed up’ to the VAR Racial Equality Charter: a visible representation of the stated aims and objectives of the campaign: ●

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To combat racism at matches involving Port Vale FC and to create a safe and welcoming environment for fans from black and minority ethnic communities To encourage the greater inclusion of local black and minority ethnic communities in the activities of Port Vale FC as players, spectators and administrative and match-day staff


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To assist Port Vale FC in the implementation of a clear and structured strategy for racial equality and equal opportunities To establish Port Vale FC as a truly community club representative of the Potteries diverse multi-ethnic communities

The mission statement and comprehensive VAR Racial Equality Action Plan (VAR REAP) incorporated the preliminary and intermediate level of the newly developed KIO RES, featuring nine key areas for attention: stadium and safety issues, fan activities, attracting BME supporters, community and educational initiatives, inclusive marketing strategies, equal opportunities for non-playing staff, equal opportunities for young players, race equality training and support for club staff, and the development and sustainability of VAR. Responsibility for the implementation of the VAR REAP was apportioned between relevant lead partners and was centrally co-ordinated through the newly constituted VAR working group, which met at regular intervals on a total of 38 separate occasions between November 2003 and April 2008. All honorary officer positions were elected annually and I acted as Chair of VAR throughout this period until stepping down in April 2008. Combating spectator racism and promoting an inclusive match-day experience Central to the aims of the VAR campaign was a stated intention to combat racism at matches involving Port Vale FC and to create a safe and welcoming environment for fans from BME communities. To this end VAR sought to engage fans creatively in support for anti-racism measures and in the promotion of a new, more inclusive, fan culture. In the first instance, VAR helped plan and co-ordinate five annual anti-racism match-day events as part of the KIO national week of action. Activities included players and club match-day staff wearing KIO branded apparel, public statements against racism over the PA system, banner parades, penalty shoot-outs and colourful ‘street-dance’ displays by local school-children. These events were supported by around 30 VAR volunteers drawn from a broad cross-section of Vale fans, including some club directors, who distributed badges, stickers and leaflets to all (5,000) fans entering the stadium. Many fans offered positive comments in support of our efforts, although others appeared noncommittal. These ‘turnstile promotions’ also probably did little to disrupt the more deeply embedded racism of those fans who openly refused offers of badges and stickers or that of one middle-aged woman who snatched a KIO magazine from her own child’s hand and threw it into a nearby bin with the words ‘Paki lovers’. The significant presence of VAR at annual club ‘Open Day’ events provided VAR volunteers with opportunities to engage fans more conversationally and to articulate more fully the aims and objectives of the campaign.


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Work here was supported by a variety of interactive educational mediums such as display boards, a locally tailored history of black footballers exhibition, video presentations and personalised badge-making facilities for children. At one event of this kind, more than 400 Vale fans and the Port Vale players bought specially designed wristbands and signed a petition in support of a wider campaign to challenge racism in North Staffordshire. The launch of the VAR website in 2007 further publicised the activities of the campaign to the club’s growing internet community of local and more geographically dispersed fans and has provided a useful conduit for users to explore the work of other football based anti-racism initiatives in England and Europe. The extent to which the work of VAR has contributed to a reduction in spectator racism is empirically difficult to evaluate. Anecdotally, at least, there have been no recent incidents of mass racist chanting, although some low-level individualised racist abuse of black players does still occur, more so at nearby away fixtures which offer opportunities for heavy-drinking ‘lads away days’ and a more intense atmosphere than is the case at home games. Further, engaging with the club safety team on issues related to dealing with spectator racism was often difficult and fractious. There was a general denial that spectator racism occurred, and some hostility towards our evidenced assertions that when racism did occur, stewards showed little confidence or were poorly motivated to deal with the offenders. Offers from VAR to provide free cultural awareness training to all stewarding staff around what constituted racist language were sharply declined. More promisingly, the relatively small cluster of BME fans attending games as part of ‘targeted’ ticketing arrangements reported positively on their match-day experiences and the ‘friendly’, ‘family club’ and ‘community feel’ of Vale home matches. However, visible BME fan audits undertaken by VAR volunteers during this period indicate that while the attendance of black and Asian fans at home games has marginally improved, it remains relatively low and almost exclusively male. Building bridges between Port Vale FC and local BME communities The VAR campaign was keen to encourage a much greater engagement between Port Vale FC, its fans and local BME communities in ways which went beyond the predominant funding-driven and relatively limited school-based football coaching and educational work of the club FIC scheme and the rhetorical claims of the club’s Directors. The aims of VAR here also chimed strongly with emergent local and national social inclusion agendas, which were keen to utilise sports as a mechanism of encouraging racial integration and community cohesion. To this end, VAR devised and co- ordinated the delivery of four annual VAR Community Shield football tournaments at a local leisure centre in the shadow of the Vale Park stadium. These events


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specifically targeted and successfully attracted around 100 male adult players drawn from some of the city’s poorer multi-ethnic locales, and featured teams representing long-standing Black Caribbean and Pakistani heritage communities and newer Black African and Kurdish asylum and refugee communities. The tournament also featured more racially mixed teams and, importantly, teams made up of white Vale fan groups. Tournament costs were funded by a range of partner organisations and matches were voluntarily officiated by qualified referees, including the club Chairman. Post-tournament refreshments and trophy presentations were held in the Directors’ suite at Port Vale FC and were attended by club players, the local constituency Labour MP and local media. These often fiercely contested encounters were played in a mutually supportive and integrative community spirit and were notably successful in increasing the ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ social capital (Putnam, 2000) of some asylum-seeker and refugee groups and in addressing some issues around cultural stereotyping amongst white Vale fans. The tournament also provided an ideological and physical space in which all participant communities offered a visible riposte to the attempts of the British National Party to undermine local community relations (Robinson, 2007). A little more problematically, these events garnered little organisational or officiating support from the club’s FIC scheme or from the Staffordshire County FA, despite repeated requests from VAR: a disappointing response from bodies which should be leading the way in extending football provision to excluded communities and which suggests that both organisations have limited capacity and cultural scope. As the work and profile of VAR gathered pace, the group attracted interest and encouraged membership from a range of statutory and voluntary sector organisations with a strong organisational focus on issues around local regeneration, community development and educational initiatives. As a result VAR became increasingly well positioned to help the club shift from its traditional stance of relative cultural isolation towards a much more central one within these vibrant community networks. VAR itself also played a key facilitation and management role across a range of new multi-agency delivery-based partnerships designed to promote social inclusion. Most notable here was partnership-working with the club and the Federation of Stadium Communities (FSC) to access local regeneration funding to establish the Vale Park Community Initiative, a programme designed to use the power of sport to tackle inequalities in health, education and employment for economically deprived local populations. However, realising the full potential of these relationships was often undermined by the lack of any one member of club staff with operational responsibility for co-ordinating community liaison. The consistent non-attendance of club representatives at a range of relevant community




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partnership meetings became an increasing source of tension over time and called into question the capacity and commitment of the club to deliver on those elements of the VAR REAP which required their lead.

From the outset the VAR REAP offered a clear framework to assist Port Vale FC to implement and embed a clear and structured strategy for racial equality and equal opportunities. In the first instance, VAR assisted the club to conduct an ethnic monitoring audit of club staff and sought to help review and rewrite the club’s existing, but limited, equal opportunities policy. Progress to complete these relatively simple tasks was slow and made apparent the disorganised operational infrastructure of the club and the lack of inter-departmental cohesion in this respect. For some senior administrators at the club, the attempts of VAR to embed more equitable working practices were seen as ‘meddling’, ‘political correctness’ and ‘anti-white’, and were thought to be of little relevance to the main business of the club. Furthermore, throughout this period the club continued to operate relatively closed ‘personal networking’ recruitment practices. Its existing and new staff are all white. To try to address some of these individualised and more institutional processes of racial exclusion, the VAR campaign embarked on a comprehensive process of delivering ‘cultural awareness and anti-racism’ training to all personnel involved in the administrative management and delivery of services at Port Vale FC and members of the clubs FIC scheme. A threehour training session, run on three occasions, attracted 37 members of staff. The sessions were supported by me and were facilitated by the Vice-Chair of VAR, who had significant professional experience of delivering cultural diversity training across a range of public sector and more commercial settings on behalf of the REC. This pedagogical approach was intended to help overcome some of the perceptual and behavioural discriminations which had thus far limited the progress and scope of VAR, and to help embed racial equality practices at the club and increase the knowledge, skills and confidence of staff to deal better with issues of cultural diversity. The sessions were lively interactive affairs and club staff offered a range of ‘forthright’ perspectives on issues of ‘race’, racism and cultural diversity. A small number of staff, drawn mainly from the corporate hospitality section of the club, seemed keen to reflect on their own experiences and their potential to provide a more inclusive service to communities which had previously remained outside their professional radar. For many other staff this sense of critical reflection was much less apparent, especially amongst the dominant core of white middle-aged and older male administrators. Populist misconceptions and limited understanding around issues of ‘race’ and racism in its varying forms were commonplace, as were the propensity for crude biological and cultural stereotyping which marked out BME,


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specifically Asian, communities as culturally incompatible with the activities of the club and with local (white) societal relations more broadly. While our educational efforts during the sessions were able to engender some attitudinal shift and more appropriate use of language and terminology, the longer term behavioural and policy impact was probably much more limited. We encountered even less success during the final training session, where one member of the club administrative staff exhibited an odious, misinformed and unmoveable scorn of Asian and, especially, asylum-seeker and refugee communities, and proudly announced her voting intentions towards the British National Party. The ever-optimistic Vice-Chair of VAR later reflected ‘her views were so ugly, they made ours seem attractive’. He was probably right. But it didn’t seem so at the time.

Some concluding comments Drawing on his own similar dual experience as an academic and anti-racist activist, Hylton (2009: 115) has recently suggested that ‘most anti-racism philosophies are useful conceptual tools, however practice tends to deviate from those neat views of how things ought to be’. In this chapter I have sought to offer a broadly descriptive and critically reflective account of the extent to which one such locally grounded intervention was able to translate its situated, democratic and informed ideological activism into meaningful and productive anti-racist practice, with varying degrees of success. Work to involve and create ownership of anti-racism amongst fans was creatively delivered and often positively endorsed. That spectator racism at Port Vale matches remains a relatively rare and individualised occurrence should not be under-estimated in a city where the British National Party has significant electoral support and where openly expressed racist sentiment is commonplace (even amongst some club employees). It is not the intention here to suggest that a ninety-minute ‘race’ silence from supporters constitutes success in tackling racism, but, rather, that the work of VAR, however temporary and partial, has had some effect in challenging the racism of some fans and empowering the anti-racism of others, and has provided a solid foundation upon which the club might build in terms of actively seeking out new fans from BME communities. The club is certainly better placed to do so and should have a greater knowledge of local community networks than has been the case in the past. It remains true, though, that much of the responsibility for building and sustaining community relations is deflected towards the club’s poorly resourced and relatively insular FIC scheme or is passed onto specific ‘short straw’ directors who have little daily contact with club operations and only limited understanding of local regeneration and social inclusion agendas. Further, in the absence of any obvious directorial management, the power of key senior administrators within the club to act as gatekeepers to the




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process of implementing or denying opportunities for best racial equality practice seemed especially strong, and largely dictated the (slow) pace and (limited) end result of the progress of VAR in this respect. Educational efforts to address the way in which individual attitudes and behaviours had contributed to colonising and shaping racially-closed operational practices within the club met with only limited success and the capacity to effect positive change seemed more likely to depend on the abilities of key members of the VAR group to establish productive personal relationships with key ‘sympathetic’ club staff. While the establishment of these important connections afforded the opportunity for VAR to assist the club in achieving the preliminary level of the KIO RES in 2006, it is less clear to what extent the club’s key power brokers fully understood the social, moral or business case for engaging in this process. As a result it can be argued that the KIO RES has engendered little ongoing integrated organisational commitment towards combating racial exclusions or addressing issues of equality of opportunities at the club. It is probably also the case that these issues are not peculiar to Port Vale FC, but, rather, are relatively commonplace at many more ‘traditional’ and less ‘modernised’ professional clubs in the lower echelons of the Football League. Whilst the limited or non-engagement with the KIO RES on the part of most smaller professional clubs is probably underscored by some very real infrastructural capacity issues at clubs and at KIO, it is probably also the case that at many clubs of this kind there is little recognition of the relevance of – or commitment towards addressing – racial equality issues, especially (but not exclusively) at clubs situated in predominantly ‘white’ small town locales. Further, at Port Vale FC and at other similar-sized clubs where vibrant and productive partnership working has enabled a positive shift towards combating racism and promoting greater racial inclusion, there seems little obvious commitment or organisational impetus from within clubs to advance beyond the preliminary level towards the intermediate level of the KIO RES or to take greater lead responsibility for practices that would support a more deeply embedded culture of equal opportunities. Limited operational progress here also reflects the inherent shortcomings of multi-agency ‘third way’ approaches to dealing with racism in professional football at the local level. In this case, the limited power of VAR to do more than recommend and encourage the implementation of policies and procedures, and its over reliance on the patronage of its key stakeholder organisation, Port Vale FC, without whose consensual and in-kind participation few practical gains could be achieved. It was also the case that the practical focus and scope of VAR increasingly moved towards those areas of the VAR REAP for which the professional expertise and voluntary commitment of VAR members was most strong. While this significantly helped to sustain the interest, momentum and longevity of the campaign for many community activists, it probably also lessened the potential of VAR to


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address its original stated aims and objectives and to disrupt the centrality of white hegemonic structures within the club and concomitant practices of racially inflected institutional closure. In football parlance, the home record of VAR (where VAR took the lead role for actions with the broader support of the club) was good, but contrasted sharply with our less impressive away record (where the club was expected to take the lead role for actions with the broader support of VAR). This conceptual separation of VAR and Port Vale FC is intentional and is arguably reflective of how the club came to perceive the campaign as something which was run on their behalf by willing volunteers or a charitable body (akin to the club’s fan organisations and FIC scheme) rather than something for which the club might assume a more central ownership. This conceptual separation was also compounded by the tendency of some club administrators to exhibit an underlying disregard for the significant professional skills, expertise and experience of the voluntary workforce of VAR premised on a false dichotomous understanding of VAR members as unpaid, unskilled club outsiders, and club staff as paid, skilled club insiders. These misplaced perceptions on the part of club administrators ultimately limited the club’s engagement with VAR and undermined and destabilised the equanimity, cohesiveness and effectiveness of the partnership. The experiences of VAR in this latter respect is probably not unique, and suggests a much wider social malaise within the professional football industry in England as a whole, in which many clubs remain constricted by modes of operational insularity and a largely rhetorical and markedly defensive engagement in collaborative multi-agency partnerships designed to assist them to combat racism, promote racial inclusion, and embed equitable working practices. This remains a disappointing response from professional football clubs, especially within the context of the growth and increased maturity of a nationally co-ordinated, accessible and enabling anti-racism industry in the sport, and the wider post-1997 political backdrop in which the New Labour government has actively encouraged ‘third sector’ partnership solutions as a means of addressing social problems such as racism and racial inequalities at a local and national level. In this latter respect, the strengths and limitations of the consciously consensual (rather than conflictual) ‘critical friend’ approach of VAR has been informed by – and is reflective of – the dominant political paradigm of the time, and has arguably both enabled and limited the scope and impact of the campaign. This framework for local action and the processes featured within it should, of course, be open to critical evaluation in ways which offer opportunities for conceptual reflection and practical re-adjustment. As the experiences recounted in this chapter have shown, challenging racisms and their multiple applications in professional football through local multi-agency collaboration is most certainly not, nor should we expect it to be, as simple as black and white.




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14 George B. Cunningham

Introduction Does diversity in sport reduce prejudice? The answer to this intriguing query largely depends on who is asked. Functional theorists might point to the many virtues of sport and how it is a place that brings a diverse group of people together through a collective interest or communal striving for success. For instance, Hums and MacLean (2009: 80) submitted that, in addition to promoting character development, leadership skills and personal responsibility, interscholastic sport participation in the US allowed young athletes to ‘benefit from cross-cultural contact’, and presumably the accompanying reduction in prejudice. Others have advanced these arguments further by suggesting that sport is a place free from the racial constraints and conflicts found in other segments of society (Fordham, 1988). In commenting on this unique context, Brown et al., (2003: 165) suggested that ‘there’s “no race” on the playing field’ because athletes are otherwise consumed with their sport participation and defining themselves as athletes, above all else. From this perspective, then, sport is a place free of racial strife and conflict, and therefore, diversity in sport results in an amelioration of prejudice. From a different perspective, some argue that sport is a context where prejudice and discrimination are commonplace. Critical race theorists argue, for instance, that racism is endemic in society (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997), and that ‘Whites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for people of color only when they also promote White self-interest’ (Singer, 2005: 468). Sport is not immune to these ills. For instance, in August 2007, Glasgow Rangers midfielder DeMarcus Beasley scored a goal in a Champions League qualifying match. While many in the crowd cheered this accomplishment, others shouted racist ‘monkey chants’ at him. Following the game, Beasley commented: ‘I can’t believe racist abuse is still in football. People can come to a match and jeer, but the racist things have got to get out of football’ (Anon, 2007). Similarly, John Carew and Daniel Braathen faced


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racist taunts when their Norway team played Slovenia in a World Cup qualifying match in 2005 (Anon, 2005). Other examples can also be cited, such as coaches of colour being spit on by opposing White players (Lawrence, 2004) or receiving fewer rewards for similar career investments (Sagas and Cunningham, 2005). Thus, rather than being a race-neutral setting, critical race theorists would point to these and other examples to illustrate the institutionalised nature of racism in sport. How does one make sense of these seemingly contradictory positions? I argue here that the answer depends on the presence of key group conditions that shape people’s perceptions of diversity and their evaluations of dissimilar others. Consideration of these moderators, or boundary conditions, is important for both theoretical and practical reasons. From a theoretical perspective, one criterion of good theory is the clear specification of when a given effect is thought to be strong or weak (Whetten, 1989). As evidenced by the previous examples, such an articulation is critical to understanding the role of diversity in reducing prejudice. Practically speaking, failing to recognise the potential contingencies in the relationship between diversity and prejudice reduction can result in poor decision-making and unfounded expectations. Thus, identifying and understanding these key moderators allows for a complete picture of whether and how diversity in sport reduces prejudice. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to specify the conditions under which diversity in sport results in a reduction of racial prejudice. In doing so, I draw from the social psychology literature to suggest that prejudice can be conceptualised as differential evaluations of in-group and out-group members. The key to reducing prejudice is, then, to alter these evaluations. In the next part of this chapter, I provide an overview of the social categorisation framework and review the approaches it suggests for reducing prejudice.

Theoretical underpinnings Social categorisation The social categorisation framework, which combines elements of both social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and self-categorisation theory (Turner et al., 1987), provides an ideal framework for understanding prejudice and discrimination (see also Riordan, 2000). From this perspective, people categorise themselves and others into groups. This classification can be based on a number of factors, such as demographic characteristics (race, gender), attitudes and beliefs (conservative, liberal) or other memberships (for example, team fan). Thus, people come to classify themselves in terms of a social identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). In doing so, people who hold similar characteristics to the self are considered in-group members, while those who differ from the self are considered out-group members.




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All else equal, people will hold more positive attitudes and exhibit more trust toward in-group members than they will toward out-group members, thereby creating ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamics. These categorisations and related biases are then cognitively stored and used in subsequent interactions (Tsui and Gutek, 1999). In this way, attitudes formed toward out-group members in one situation are likely to be applied toward those in the same social category in subsequent situations. These dynamics occur because the categorisation process results in stereotypes about in-group and out-group members. As Tsui and Gutek (1999: 48) correctly note, ‘without categorisation, stereotyping does not occur’. Of course, not all differences result in social categorisation and subsequent inter-group bias. The members of a given athletic team, for instance, probably differ in their shoe size, hair colour and handedness, yet these personal characteristics are seldom (if ever) a source of bias or prejudice.1 Rather, a given personal characteristic is likely to be a source of categorisation when it is particularly salient (Turner et al., 1987; van Knippenberg et al., 2004). For instance, in a study of college athletes (Cunningham et al., 2008), we examined the degree to which dissimilarity from others had an impact on perceptions of dissimilarity, fit with the team and satisfaction with teammates. We found that this linkage depended on the athlete’s personal racial identity – that is, the degree to which race was a central part of who she or he was as a person. Student athletes racially dissimilar from their teammates were more likely to perceive such differences when they had a high racial personal identity, relative to when they did not. Perceptions of being racially different were important, as they were linked with psychological fit with the team and overall satisfaction with teammates. Our results suggest that the importance of a given social category is likely to influence the degree to which it is a source of subsequent attitudes and perceptions (see also Randell and Jaussi, 2003). Even if a personal characteristic is salient and a source of social categorisation, this does not necessarily mean that intergroup bias will automatically result. Rather, the link between social categorisation and intergroup bias is moderated by identity threat (van Knippenberg et al., 2004). A person’s group membership reflects how they see themselves. As people generally want to maintain a positive image of the self, this also translates into how they would like to see the group – that is, as a positive and distinctive identity (Hogg and Abrams, 1988). When such a positive identity is challenged, intergroup bias is likely to result. Challenges to the distinctiveness and positive perceptions of the group (and hence, the self) can come in many forms, such as competition for status or prestige, derogation of the group, or blatant discrimination. An example of this can be seen with sports fans. Competition between teams serves to challenge the status of the fans’ teams (that is, one team wants to beat the other), thereby prompting bias against the opposing team and its fans. Even people who might be friends in other


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contexts, such as the classroom, might be seen as ‘enemies’ or ‘the opposition’ if they root for the opposing team. Thus, identity threat is thought to increase the positive association between categorisation and bias. Without such a threat, bias is unlikely to exist.

In drawing from the social categorisation framework, prejudice can be conceived of as different evaluations of in-group and out-group members. Most discussions of diversity and prejudice focus on traditional (that is, principled, ‘old fashioned’) prejudice, particularly within the sport setting. This form of prejudice exists when people express and consciously maintain explicit negative attitudes toward out-group members (Dovidio et al., 2001; Quillian, 2006; Son Hing et al., 2008). Thus, from a social categorisation perspective, racists consciously hold positive attitudes toward in-group members and negative attitudes toward out-group members. Not all racism is explicit and consciously maintained, however. There also exists what Gaertner and Dovidio (2000: 17) term aversive racism, or ‘a form of modern prejudice that characterizes the racial attitudes of many Whites with egalitarian values, who regard themselves as non-prejudiced, but who discriminate in subtle, rationalized ways’. With this form of prejudice, people’s progressive, justice-minded value system conflicts with unacknowledged negative racial attitudes. These attitudes result from (a) a history of racial prejudice in a given context and (b) the categorisation of racially different others as out-group members (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2000). Unlike the ‘old fashioned’ racist, aversive racists will not discriminate in situations with strong social norms or when the discriminatory acts could be attributed to the self. Rather, aversive racists will tend to discriminate when the normative structure is weak, when there are vague guidelines for the appropriate course of action, and when a negative response can be attributed to a factor other than race (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2000, 2005). This dynamic is what Son Hing et al., (2008) refer to as the attributional-ambiguity effect. In terms of intergroup evaluations, aversive racists do not necessarily have negative attitudes toward out-group members. Rather, aversive racism is thought to ‘represent a general indifference to racial out-group members rather than a sharply focused negative orientation toward them’ (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2005: 627). This perspective is consistent with Brewer’s (1979) position that modern prejudice is more the result of pro-in-group bias rather than out-group derogation. Note, too, the difference in evaluations between traditional and aversive racists: the former’s bias results from negative attitudes toward the out-group, while the latter is a function of more positive attitudes toward the in-group. Figure 14.1 provides an illustrative summary of these differences. In short, the social categorisation framework (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Turner et al., 1987; van Knippenberg et al., 2004), and the associated discussion


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Out-group members

In-group members Target

Traditional racism Figure 14.1

Aversive racism

Differences in bias between aversive and traditional racists

of in-group and out-group distinctions, provides an ideal perspective for understanding the perceptual grouping of the self and others, attitudes and preferences toward various persons, and prejudice. Given the efficacy of this approach, researchers have targeted the categorisation process in their efforts to reduce and end prejudice, particularly in group settings (for an exceptional review of these and other strategies, see Paluck and Green, 2009). I draw from this approach to outline the moderating conditions that affect the degree to which diversity in a group serves to ameliorate prejudice.

Categorisation-based approaches to reducing prejudice Intergroup contact Many of the categorisation-based strategies for reducing prejudice have their foundation in Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis (see also Pettigrew, 1998). According to this theory, extended interactions among people who are otherwise dissimilar from one another should serve to break down the barriers. The positive effects of contact are thought to be accentuated when there is equal status between the groups, common goals that the group members seek to achieve, cooperation among group members and support from authorities or customs. Later extensions of the theory have included friendships


Negative

Positive

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Attitudes among In-group members

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(Pettigrew, 1998), or the potential thereof (Cunningham, 2008b), as an additional antecedent condition. The conditions of contact are thought to result in a number of important intergroup processes (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998). First, contact allows people to acquire information about dissimilar others, and as a result, stereotypes are often disconfirmed. Second, intergroup contact results in behavioural changes. Given that interaction with others who differ from the self is outside the norm, extended contact is the first in a series of other steps toward attitudinal and behavioural modification. Third, extended contact is likely to lessen any intergroup anxiety and might even serve to generate empathy toward out-group members. Finally, extended contact with dissimilar others often serves to cause one to reappraise the in-group. That is, people realise that their (and other in-group members’) worldview is one of many, and this recognition recasts the way people view themselves and others. A number of researchers have demonstrated the benefits of intergroup contact in altering attitudes and behaviours among persons who vary in their sexual orientation (Herek and Capitanio, 1996), personal demographics (Pettigrew, 1997) or nationality (Ellers and Abrams, 2003). Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) impressive meta-analysis demonstrates that the effects are observed across groups and time. The lone study identified in the sport context took place during a sport management study abroad programme (Cunningham et al., in press). The five-week programme consisted of 20 students from six different countries and was designed to emphasise equal status, co-operation, common goals among the students and support from the administrators for diversity. In general support of Allport’s (1954) theory, results indicated that intergroup friendships and evaluations of out-group members both improved over the course of the programme, while crosscultural anxiety remained low. Despite the supporting evidence, there are a number of potential limitations associated with Allport’s theory (Brewer and Gaertner, 2001). First, most of the studies (albeit not those previously cited) have been conducted in the laboratory setting, thereby raising concerns among some about the degree to which the conditions of contact would reduce prejudice in real-world settings with a history of intergroup hostility. Second, the reduction of prejudice in one setting might not translate into a corresponding reduction in other settings. Finally, as previously noted, there are a number of conditions that must be present for intergroup contact to reduce prejudice, and this raises concerns that there are too many qualifiers for the theory’s tenets to be effectively applied in practice. Given these concerns, social psychologists have looked to the social categorisation framework – seen as more elegant and complete than the contact hypothesis – to understand and reduce prejudice (Brewer and Gaernter,




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2001). The social categorisation approaches are outlined in the following sections.

Decategorisation represents the first categorisation-based approach to reducing prejudice. With this approach, the focus is on breaking down the categorisation boundaries that provide the basis for intergroup bias (Brewer and Miller, 1984). From this perspective, repeated, individualised interactions among in-group and out-group members should ultimately reduce bias. This is accomplished in two ways. First, decategorisation allows for differentiation between out-group members. In this way, people come to recognise that dissimilar others are not members of a homogeneous outgroup, but instead, are actually unique, discrete individuals. Second, personalised interactions with another person are followed by comparison of that person to the self. This results in a process called personalisation, where out-group members are viewed ‘in terms of their uniqueness and in relation to self’ (Hewstone et al., 2002: 589). Both of these processes, differentiation and personalisation, serve to break down the categorisation-based walls that separate in-group and out-group members and provide the basis for subsequent biases and prejudice. A number of studies have supported the notion that decategorisation reduces prejudice (see Gaertner et al., 1989; Bettencourt et al., 1992). In one study particularly relevant to the current discussion, Jones and Foley (2003) conducted an experiment to examine the degree to which decategorisation could reduce racial bias among school-age students. In their experimental condition, students heard a presentation that covered anthropology (the origin of humans, the spread of humans across the globe), the fallacy of depending on physical biological characteristics to determine differences among people, and the concept that almost everyone in the US had ancestors from around the globe. This information served to provide the two key intervening mechanisms: differentiation and personalisation. In the control condition, students were read Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go!. Jones and Foley found that, relative to those in the control condition, children in the experimental condition were more likely to perceive similarities between the self and others, thereby reducing the prejudice formerly held toward out-group members. There are a number of examples of decategorisation at work in the sport context as well. For instance, the manner in which the Dallas Cup manages player accommodation illustrates this point (see Cunningham, 2007a). The Dallas Cup is a week-long soccer tournament, held in Dallas, TX, in which players from around the world compete. Accommodation for the international competitors is provided by the local competitors, and the dissimilarities among the players often results in initial unease and anxiety. By the end of the week, these negative effects have subsided to the extent that tears


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of sadness often accompany the goodbyes. According to the tournament organisers, the closeness among the otherwise dissimilar players is attributed ‘to the fact that the players get to know one another on a very personal level during the week and grow quite fond of one another’ (Cunningham, 2007a: 328). As another example, in a scene from Remember the Titans, Coach Boone (played by Denzel Washington) instructs his football players to learn unique information about their opposite-race roommate, after which they are instructed to report back to the rest to relay the information they have learned. Thus, the players not only interacted with one another on an interpersonal level, but learned about their teammates from the reports back to the team. I acknowledge that Hollywood dramatises events, even those based on true stories such as this one. However, as depicted in the movie, this technique (along with others) served to break down the categorisationbased boundaries that, up to that time, had served to derail the functioning of the team. As these examples illustrate, decategorisation appears to be a viable tool in reducing prejudice. When group members (of an athletic team or sport organisation) are able to learn about each other’s unique, personal characteristics, it is likely that the categorisation boundaries will diminish. And, while simply learning about the out-group serves to break down barriers (Jones and Foley, 2003), the effects of intimate, personalised interactions, such as those found with friendships, are still stronger (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005). Recategorisation Recategorisation represents a second strategy for reducing prejudice. Past researchers have shown that prejudice, particularly in its implicit form, is a function of pro-in-group bias rather than out-group derogation (Brewer, 1979, 1999; see Figure 14.1). Thus, behaviour directed toward out-group members is not necessarily a reflection of disdain, but more likely reflect an indifference, as one might show to a stranger (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2005). If this is the case, then reducing prejudice might simply be a function of activating an interest in out-group members and increasing feelings of connectedness with them. This is the purpose of recategorisation. Specifically, Gaertner and Dovidio (2000: 46) argued that ‘if members of different groups are induced to conceive of themselves within a single group rather than as completely separate groups, attitudes toward former outgroup members will become more positive through the cognitive and motivational processes involving pro-ingroup bias.’ That is, when persons from different social groups come to conceive of themselves as a single group, then former out-group members come to be seen as in-group members. As a result, all persons (both in-group and former out-group members) are afforded positive attitudes and perceptions, and the behavioural manifestations (for example,




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helping) correspond accordingly. Thus, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamics that result in prejudice are replaced with a more inclusive ‘we’ mentality. In their initial test of this theory, Gaertner et al., (1999) examined how prejudice was affected by two three-person laboratory groups coming to conceive of themselves either as a common group, two separate groups, or a collection of separate individuals. A common in-group was established by spatially integrating the members of the two groups, asking the members to create a single name for the group, and designing a task that required co-operative interdependence. In the two-group condition, the groups sat apart from one another, they maintained their original team names, and the task was designed such that the performance of the separate groups was considered. Finally, in the separate individuals condition, participants worked separately after breaking from their initial three-person group. They then reconvened with their original group members and those from the other three-person group, at which time they individually shared their answers to the task and were evaluated on their individual performance, as opposed to that of the group. Consistent with the predictions of Gaertner et al., bias in the one-group and separate-individuals conditions was significantly less than it was in the two-group condition. The bias was reduced in different ways, however. For persons in the one-group condition, evaluations of former out-group members improved, consistent with the notion of pro-in-group bias. In the separate-individuals condition, evaluations of former in-group members became less positive, and thus on a par with those of the out-group members. Subsequent work in this area has largely supported the benefits of a common in-group identity. For instance, Nier et al., (2001; Study 2) found that Whites’ helping behaviours directed toward African–Americans was a function of the perceived connectedness with that person. Whites were more likely to help an African–American who was considered an in-group member, in this case a fan of the same university, than they were to help a perceived out-group member. Helping behaviours directed toward other Whites, however, did not vary based on in-group membership. The positive effects are also observed in the workplace (Terry and O’Brien, 2001; Cunningham and Chelladurai, 2004; Cunningham, 2005). As one example, I examined the relationships between racial dissimilarity, a common in-group identity, and co-worker satisfaction among university track and field coaches. For coaches who were racially similar to others, the presence of a common in-group identity did not influence their attitudes toward their peers. A different pattern emerged among those who racially differed from their colleagues, as co-worker satisfaction was highest when the staff was characterised by a common in-group identity and lowest when it was not. Critics of recategorisation argue that the process forces people to forgo important personal identities in favour of the larger group identity (Swann




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et al., 2004). In a racially diverse athletic team, this would mean that players would not identify as Whites, African–Americans, or any other racial identity, but only as members of the team. Such assimilation approaches are undesirable and have been widely criticised by diversity scholars (Doherty and Chelladurai, 1999). However, recategorisation does not require people to abandon other identities. Rather, group members can maintain their original identities while still envisaging themselves as members of different groups who are part of a larger team – that is, as subgroups under a common identity (see Gaertner et al., 1999, for empirical support). In commenting on the negative consequences of assimilation, Gaertner and Dovidio (2000: 49) noted that ‘it would be undesirable or impossible for people to relinquish these group identities or, as perceivers, to be colorblind.’ Thus, concerns that recategorisation promotes assimilation are probably unfounded. Collectively, this research suggests that prejudice can be reduced when a common in-group identity is established. Not only does a common in-group identity alter the attitudes and behaviours directed toward former out-group members, but it also positively influences outcomes for the individuals and the group as a whole (Terry and O’Brien, 2001; Cunningham, 2005, 2007b). Thus, prejudice is likely to be reduced in diverse groups when the members of the group perceive a connectedness among group members and believe that the group is characterised by a common-in-group identity. Intergroup contact Intergroup contact theory, sometimes also referred to as mutual group differentiation or salient categorisation, offers a third approach to reducing prejudice in diverse groups (Hewstone and Brown, 1986; Brown and Hewstone, 2005). Whereas decategorisation and recategorisation approaches to reducing prejudice both seek to alter the categorisation boundaries, intergroup contact theory holds, somewhat paradoxically, that intergroup salience should be maintained. Specifically, intergroup contact that satisfies Allport’s (1954) conditions for contact (equal status, common goals, cooperation among group members, support from authorities and friendship potential) should result in the largest and most reliable reductions in prejudice when the contact is with prototypical out-group members. If outgroup members are not seen as prototypical, then people might discount stereotype-disconfirming information and view the person as an outlier (see Allport, 1954; see also Long et al., 1997). In this case, positive attitudes would be directed to the individual, but not necessarily the out-group as a whole. However, when group memberships are salient and out-group members are viewed as ‘typical’ of that group (that is, high goodness-of-fit), then reduced prejudice directed toward members of that out-group is also thought to be generalised to other out-group members as well. Empirical evidence to support intergroup contact theory is impressive (for a review, see Brown and Hewstone, 2005). Binder et al., (2009) provided one




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of the most comprehensive, eloquent tests of the theory thus far. In their longitudinal analysis, they surveyed ethnic minority (n = 512) and ethnic majority (n = 1143) school students in three European countries (Belgium, England and Germany) to examine the relationship between intergroup contact and prejudice, as well as the influence of key intervening variables. They found that contact with out-group members was predictive of prejudice reduction six months later, and these effects were moderated by the perceived typicality of the out-group members with whom the contact took place. The effects were mediated by intergroup anxiety, such that contact with out-group members resulted in decreased anxiety, which was then followed by prejudice reduction. The latter effects were predominantly observed among majority members rather than among ethnic minorities (see also Tropp and Pettigrew, 2005, for similar findings). In explaining why the reduction in prejudice takes place, Brown and Hewstone (2005) argue that Allport’s (1954) conditions for contact, and friendships in particular, are requisite conditions. Furthermore, in their earlier conceptualisations of the theory (Hewstone and Brown, 1986), they also pointed to the importance of mutual group differentiation, whereby prejudice would be reduced if people could realise the respective strengths and superiorities of the other group. While these authors do not attend to this point as much in their recent work, others have extended this line of thinking. Specifically, van Knippenberg and his colleagues have argued that diversity mindsets play a significant role in the relationship between group diversity and subsequent outcomes. The basic premise is that ‘the effects of diversity should be more positive in contexts where individuals, groups, and organisations have more favorable beliefs about and attitudes toward diversity, are more focused on harvesting the benefits of diversity, and have a better understanding of how to realize these benefits’ (van Knippenberg and Schippers, 2007: 531). There is compelling evidence to support the notion that pro-diversity mindsets will result in better intergroup processes and outcomes. As one example, Ely and Thomas (2001: 257), found that employees who worked in organisations where diversity was valued and fully integrated into the structure and processes were also likely to feel valued and respected, engage in meaningful communications concerning diversity, and perceive their differences from others as ‘a potential source of insight and skill’. In a laboratory study, Homan et al. (2007) examined the degree to which diversity beliefs influenced interactions among persons in groups where categorisation boundaries were salient. They found that groups with pro-diversity beliefs were more likely to interact in a positive manner with one another, which in turn resulted in reliable performance gains relative to their counterparts. In a similar way, van Knippenberg et al., (2007), in both their experimental and field-based studies, found that people more closely identified with




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diverse groups when they believed that diversity added to the value of that group. I have observed similar patterns in studies of university athletic departments. For instance, university athletic departments that couple high employee diversity with a strong collective commitment to diversity have been shown to enjoy a number of benefits, including employee satisfaction (Cunningham, 2008a). In a separate study, I examined the degree to which the racial diversity of department employees interacted with the organisational culture of diversity to predict objective measures of performance. Results indicated that performance was highest among those departments with high employee diversity and an organisational culture that valued and promoted diversity (Cunningham, 2009). It is worth noting that these studies, as well as those cited earlier (Ely and Thomas, 2001; Homan et al., 2007; van Knippenberg et al., 2007), do not assess prejudice directly. However, as intergroup bias and prejudice are likely to impede organisational functioning (van Knippenberg et al., 2004), these positive outcomes suggest that a reduction in bias potentially accompanied the pro-diversity mindsets. Collectively, these studies suggest that intergroup contact theory’s underlying tenets could be employed to effectively reduce prejudice in diverse groups. Given that (a) many athletic teams are racially diverse (see Lapchick, 2009), (b) people are likely to use race in the social categorisation process (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2000) and (c) race is an important part of one’s personal identity, especially among racial minorities (Cunningham et al., 2008), seeking to alter racial identities and social categorisations for extended periods of time is likely to be difficult. However, the research related to intergroup contact theory suggests that such efforts are unnecessary and even detrimental. Rather, coaches and administrators should seek to keep the racial categories salient, employ Allport’s conditions of contact, including the potential to develop friendships, and demonstrate the benefits that racial diversity brings to the team or workplace. Doing so is likely to improve attitudes toward racial out-group members and racial out-groups as a whole. Conceptual integration At first blush, the three approaches outlined here: decategorisation, recategorisation and intergroup contact (salient categorisation), appear to contradict one another. One calls for a reduction of categorisation boundaries, the next argues for a larger, more inclusive categorisation, and the final approach suggests that initial in-group and out-group distinctions should remain. While apparently different in their perspectives, these approaches to reducing prejudice can be reconciled, as evidenced by Pettigrew’s (1998) integrated framework (see also Cunningham, 2004, 2007a). Figure 14.2 provides an illustrative summary.




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Conditions of contact

Decategorisation

Salient categorisation

Recategorisation

Characteristics and experiences Generalisation of prejudice reduction None Figure 14.2 prejudice

Maximal

Conceptual integration of categorisation-based approaches to reducing

Pettigrew articulated several antecedent conditions that influence the reduction of prejudice. Specifically, he suggested that Allport’s (1954) conditions of contact and the potential to develop friendships with out-group members (Pettigrew, 1997; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2005) were both necessary for decategorisation to take place. Other antecedent conditions might also influence the categorisation process, including one’s previous experiences and personal characteristics. The latter antecedents are important considerations, as research has shown, for instance, that Whites and racial minorities differ in how they interact with out-group members and in their willingness to alter categorisation boundaries (Cunningham et al., 2008; Tropp and Pettigrew, 2005). Pettigrew (1998) then argued that the most successful strategy for reducing prejudice would be to first structure group interactions so as to minimise the salience of group categorisations (decategorisation). This would then be followed by a strategy in which categories were made salient (intergroup contact theory), and concluding with the development of a common in-group identity (recategorisation). These sequences take place over time and result in increased bias reduction toward the out-group as a whole. Pettigrew further suggested that such a process should reduce intergroup anxiety, promote friendships with out-group members, allow for the individual-to-group generalisation of positive attitudes and behaviours, and capitalise on the social benefits of having an inclusive social network with which people can identify. Empirical tests of the model have yielded general support (see Ellers and Abrams, 2003). There are several ways a coach could implement such a model with her team, including the following scenario. Initial activities could include off-site team activities, such as participation in a ropes course activity or other adventure escape. Such activities offer a host of benefits, including


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the strengthening of interpersonal relationships and reducing boundaries among team members. These off-site activities could be followed by additional interpersonal communications among racially diverse team members, all the while ensuring that racial categorisations were salient. The coaching staff should be certain to promote the contact among racially different team members so that they perceive strong institutional support. These two approaches, which incorporate the first two aspects of the integrated model, should also result in reduced intergroup anxiety and the potential for friendship development seen as so critical to reducing bias. Finally, the coach could encourage the team to collectively set team goals, promote the common fate of the team, and engage in other team-building activities as a way to promote the common identity of the players. These strategies should be reinforced throughout the season to ensure that players perceive a common in-group identity.

Conclusions The purpose of this chapter was to examine the degree to which diversity in sport served to reduce prejudice. In drawing from the social categorisation framework and the accompanying categorisation-based strategies for reducing prejudice, I have illustrated that there are many cases where diversity can indeed reduce prejudice. Even more encouraging, there is growing evidence that these approaches can result in generalised reduced prejudice: that is, the positive attitudes expressed toward individual out-group members can be extended to the general out-group (Pettigrew, 1998; Binder et al., 2009). This is, perhaps, the most promising and exciting element of the categorisation-based approaches to reducing prejudice. Equally important to understanding the underlying theoretical tenets is the recognition that categorisation-based strategies are purposely implemented. This is not to suggest that coaches and administrators consult Allport’s (1954) work (for instance) in managing their teams (though think of the benefits that would occur if they did). What I do suggest, however, is that successful managers diligently work to craft a workplace of diversity and inclusion (Cunningham and Singer, 2009), and as a result, bridge the prejudice divides that could otherwise derail their teams. These strategies could take the form of breaking down categorisation barriers, as done by the organisers of the Dallas Cup soccer tournament. Or, it could mean that bias is reduced through the formation of a common in-group identity, such as through the team-building exercises, the implementation of collective goals, and the realisation of a common fate (for an example of this with a soccer team, see Cunningham, 2007a: 332). Or again, perhaps managers could emphasise the unique contributions of different social groups and the benefits that diversity brings to




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the workplace (van Knippenberg and Schippers, 2007; see also Hewstone and Brown, 1986). The point here is not to articulate the many options that coaches and sport administrators have, but rather, to illustrate that there are options: alternatives that have been reliably shown to reduce prejudice among diverse groups. These strategies must be continually reinforced for prejudice reduction to be lasting and generalised. This means that a commitment to diversity and inclusion must be engrained in the very culture of the team or organisation and be palpable amongst the actions of its members. Without such systemic integration, it is likely that prejudice will persist and benefits of diversity go unrealised.

Notes I am grateful to John Singer and Melanie Sartore for their insightful comments that helped in the development of this chapter. 1. I recognise that in competitive environments, even these seemingly benign personal characteristics can be used as sources of differentiation and ridicule. For instance, a left-handed person might be called names or a red-haired person abused. That noted, the nature of this bias is quite different from that based on historically-rooted prejudices, such as racism.




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15 Kevin Hylton

Introduction Racism is a particular form of exclusion faced by minority ethnic groups. It is based on the false belief that some ‘races’ are inherently superior to others because of their skin colour, nationality, ethnic or cultural background. Racism denies people their basic human rights, dignity and respect. Racism is a multifaceted concept, ranging from small, everyday acts of discrimination, through the barriers and omissions that may be inadvertently established at an institutional level, to acts of threatening behaviour and violence. (National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), 2007: 24) Critical Race Theory (CRT) is used in this chapter to frame the analysis of Sport Against Racism Ireland (SARI). Internationally, SARI is not the most high profile anti-racism organisation, but for a small independent organisation it has an impact that outweighs, and may outlive, better funded organisations in this sector. SARI networks span grassroots to internationally renowned forums, utilising an anti-racism underpinned by a community development philosophy. SARI’s mission recognises findings from a large body of international research that supports the proposition that sport, along with the arts and broader cultural activities, can serve as a medium for addressing racism and enhancing social inclusion (Department of Justice Equality and Law Reform, 2005). The organisation responsible for the National Action Plan Against Racism (NAPAR), the NCCRI, has acknowledged SARI’s work as an example of good practice (Department of Justice Equality and Law Reform, 2005: 143). However, SARI also understands how the political terrain can shift and constrain anti-racism, especially as much of their activity involves lobbying influential agents inside and beyond sport. One of the highest profile changes in the anti-racism topography in Ireland has been the closure of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI).


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It can be argued that CRT helps to reveal experiences of the world that are generally ignored, marginalised or perhaps even trivialised. Racialised existences have been described by many in relation to those who live within DuBois’ ‘veil’. For those living with an acute awareness of how societies oppress and disadvantage social groups because of their experiences of ‘race’, ethnicity, nationality and their multiple social intersections (gender, class, disability), the view of the world being ‘revealed’ by CRT is one they are generally alive to but are not used to seeing systematically. Delgado and Stefancic (2001: 219) argue that ‘the incentive to innovate may be stronger in persons for whom the current system does not work’, and Audre Lorde (1979) fixed this notion of the need to innovate around anti-racism when she argued that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’: she encourages us to challenge conventional ideas and practices in a way that forces those implicated by their location in racial processes to recognise this and to transform negative racialised relations. This metaphor is useful if we imagine any building project, the craftsperson, builder or architect is limited by the range of tools and techniques they have available to build or take apart any structure. Theories and theoretical frameworks can limit or facilitate the development, direction and substance of ideas while empowering or constraining the creative capacity of their users. CRT encourages antiracists to use new tools and ideas to be critical, inclusive and challenging. I argue elsewhere that CRT can be summarised as a framework from which to explore and examine the racism in society that privileges whiteness and disadvantages others because of their ‘blackness’ (Hylton, 2009). CRT confronts ‘race-neutrality’ in policy and practice and acknowledges the value of ‘the black voice’ that is often marginalised in mainstream theory, policy and practice. CRT challenges past and present institutional arrangements in sport that racially discriminate, subjugate and oppress (Nebeker, 1998; Delgado and Stefancic, 2001). Significantly, CRT is widely held to be a pragmatic framework of principles, or tenets, that embraces the core ideals that ‘race’ and racism must be central to our scholarship and activism; that intersectional forms of oppression must also constitute this challenge to racism and racialisation; that social justice and transformation must also be significant elements of a CRT project; the black voice must be centred; colour blindness must be challenged; meritocracies and liberalism should not go uncritiqued; we should challenge convention and established practices. As a pragmatic framework CRT is necessarily transdisciplinary. Critical Race Theorists are clear that ‘race’ and racism are central to any theorising or intervention. CRT is effectively a series of critiques seeking to positively disrupt and transform racialised power relations regardless of the actors involved. Whiteness (processes) and the privileges that come with that, rather than white people (social construct) would be the focus of


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anti-racist interventions. Hence collectivities should be as much part of the focus of anti-racism as overtly racist individual actors. Importantly, ‘race’ and racism are the start points but not necessarily the end points. However, CRT starts not with the question ‘DO WE live in a racist society?’, but the statement that ‘WE DO live in a racist society’ and we need to do something about it. Therefore, anti-racism should be mainstreamed in the core business of sport.

CRT, ‘race’ and racism A misreading of CRT’s pragmatic use of the constructed idea of ‘race’ would lead to a view that it is used unproblematically, reinforcing racial thinking. Anti-racists, like others tangling with the thorny issues intersecting the racialisation of sport, must be wary of the potential for reinforcing racial thinking in their fundamental assumptions and intuitive responses to racism. As a concept, racialisation facilitates an engagement with racial processes which enables a focus on the outcomes of racial thinking and practice. An emphasis on the actual processes that have led to racisms allows antiracists to become much more focused on specific actions and challenges rather than vague or idealistic messages. The lexicon of anti-racists is more likely to become action-oriented if they are clear about what their interventions are focused upon. Racism is too vague. Racism as identified in policy contexts does not tell us enough about what has been institutionalised. It is sometimes rendered as ‘known’ and therefore subject to moral opprobrium without critique or question. It means different things to different people and its negative processes can travel in any direction across individuals or groups, regardless of background or ethnicity. Therefore anti-racism must incorporate these ideas in more nuanced ways, as racisms evolve over time and space while intersecting with other social factors. While Gilroy (1990) notes that ‘race’ must be seen with a weather eye, it is argued here that CRT navigates the landscape of racialised discourses and applies them pragmatically. Anti-racists cannot approach these issues unproblematically without reinforcing myths, stereotypes and inequalities themselves. ‘Race’ as a social construct in itself must be recognised by anti-racists but not to the point where it is reified; nor can it be trivialised and rendered unimportant (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Nevertheless, CRT’s antiessentialist standpoint cautions anti-racists to be critical of using ‘race’ and its related constructed categories (Nanton, 1989; Glover, 2009). In responding to racist acts, the construction of ‘race’, racial superiority and inferiority can be contested or perpetuated in processes of resistance. Omi and Winant (1994, 2002) are similarly not satisfied with challenging racism by purely restating the constructed, false and illusionary nature of ‘race’. This position belies the centrality of ‘race’ in the everyday vernacular of public arenas, while pragmatic scholarly activism recognises that


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the end of ‘race’ cannot be brought about just by proclaiming it, or wanting it to be. Neither do they accept the less convincing reductionist views that reify ‘race’ and spawn some anti-racist responses in sport (Back et al., 2001). An understanding of anti-racism must come from an understanding of the racial processes that influence the representation and organisation of individual bodies and social structures. Our raced bodies and structures can be reinforced, or reconstructed over time through the hegemony of racial ideologies (Goldberg, 1993), raciology (Gilroy, 2000a) and the process of racialisation (Murji and Solomos, 2005), just as they can be challenged and transformed (Omi and Winant, 1994, 2002; Westwood, 2002). Omi and Winant (2002: 124) define racial formation as ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’. ‘Racial projects’ occur in sport (for example, at the level of sport coach) where ideologies about physicality and intellectual abilities may do little more than reinforce biological differences and racialised binaries (Spracklen, 2008). However, anti-racism in sport must take on different forms, because the racial projects that Omi and Winant speak of are multifarious. Antiracists must recognise and understand the version of ‘race’ thinking, racialisation or, as Gilroy would argue, ‘raciology’, being manifest through racial projects and importantly how they influence social relations or resource allocations along the fissures of ‘race’. In sport there are many examples of everyday racial projects that exemplify processes that organise resources along racial lines in seemingly ‘natural’ ways. Both discursive and behavioural practices can be identified as targets for anti-racists, but their everyday reproduction makes them slippery, ambiguous, even hegemonic, and therefore requiring a critical lens from which to approach them. There is a misconception that CRT views other social factors as subordinate to ‘race’ and racism. CRT does not support the notion of a hierarchy of oppressions and seeks to centralise intersecting forms of oppression without ignoring racialised dimensions, especially where ‘race’ has been ignored in the past (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado and Stefancic, 2000; Wing Sue et al., 2008). Drawing on critical race theory in his analysis of sport and British Asians, Burdsey (2007) states that one of CRT’s objectives is to highlight the relationship between ‘race’ and other forms of oppression. Like critical race theorists, Gilroy (1990) argues for an intersectional approach to anti-oppression, which incorporates more elaborate strategies to challenge the power relations between men and women, capital and labour, rather than placing an abstract focus on racism. Sport itself can be viewed as the sum, albeit contested, of racial projects, behavioural and discursive, that pose a challenge to anti-racists because they are explicit and covert, individual, institutional and societal, routinised and ad hoc. Being anti-racism requires an understanding of racism that is neither fixed nor static, reductionist or essentialist, ahistorical or ill-defined.


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Accordingly, Omi and Winant (1994: 60) add another layer of complexity to strategic anti-racism in sport when they suggest ‘nor is it possible to organize, maintain, or transform social structures without simultaneously engaging ... explicitly or implicitly, in racial signification’.

Anti-racism must pose a level of resistance to sport’s pluralist ideologies of ‘level playing fields’ and ‘colourblindness’. Colour-blindness has been described by Bonilla-Silva as an ideology that defends the racial order. His proposal that there are four main ways in which colour-blindness is framed goes some way to explaining some of the complexities of anti-racism and also why colour-blindness is a central target for critical race theorists. For Bonilla-Silva, abstract liberalism, naturalisation, cultural racism and minimisation of racism frame colour-blindness. However, Bonilla-Silva (2006) views abstract liberalism as the most pervasive and dangerous due to its seemingly conciliatory, rational and commonly heard arguments. It incorporates the same pluralist ideology that argues for free markets, individualism and agency while extending the ideas of unfettered social policy which directly affects the implementation of equality and anti-racism, denying the state’s role in contributing to and reinforcing racialised inequalities (Wieviorka, 1995; Winant, 2001; Omi and Winant, 2002). The need for positive action, often described in the public sector as ‘radical’ because of its redistributive approach, is often opposed due to CRT’s transformatory but ‘anti-competitive’ approach. In sport, positive action or equality strategies that attempt to rebalance historical inequalities are sometimes criticised for their denial of resources to those whose past status has enabled to be privileged by their whiteness. In South Africa, Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile is campaigning for black talent to be given the opportunities and support given to white sportsmen and women in the past. Stofile refuses to ignore the historical legacy of apartheid, just as others would not wish to ignore slavery, Jim Crowism, colonialism, or xenophobia. In 2009, as a follow-up to his 2008 budget speech when he said ‘most of our sports federations do not have a transformation agenda, except on paper only’ (Stofile, 2008), he spoke on the subject of deracialisation and transformation: We cannot leave the issue of unequal access to opportunities to chance or the market forces. If we did, sport will divide, not unite South Africa. We have been there before ... For some this will be a threat to their privileges. For others it will be a window of hope. How we see this will invariably be influenced by what apartheid bequeathed to us. So, Transformation is a non-negotiable ... But we must, as we attempt to deracialise and transform our sport, have clarity of mind as to whether we stick to professionalism


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234 Kevin Hylton

Social justice and transformation are core goals of CRT. As in Stofile’s example, policy and practice cannot be blind to racialised relations, especially regarding services and facilities. For Stofile, as for critical race theorists, transformation means a challenge to the status quo caused by historical racialised privileges that still maintain a residual value. When approaches to anti-racism in sport deny that the under-representation of black people is a real problem, or even that state intervention is not necessary in prioritising the resourcing of some over others, then they approach social justice with an ahistorical, colour-blind approach. CRT is supportive but critical of the liberal incrementalism of the Left. History has shown that the gains made through the legal system and state-sponsored racial equality are unsatisfactory and ponderous in many cases (Solomos and Ball, 1990; Winant, 2001). Social change needs to be strategic but, wherever possible, proactive and radical. For Stofile to argue that most of our sports federations do not have a transformation agenda, except on paper only is to challenge the system in the way that CRT seeks to challenge convention and existing power relations. To give some an advantage over others in this way may prompt those using an abstract liberalist argument to suggest that this approach is ‘inequitable’ and without worth. CRT has been critical of apolitical mainstream methodologies being colour-blind and reinforcing oppressions while subordinating the voices and values of those rendered invisible by conventional modes of thinking. ‘Race’, class, gender and their intersections have regularly been excluded from important social and political landmarks and developments in knowledge or dominant paradigms. As a result the use of ‘voicing’ and storytelling/counter-storytelling have become popular tools in the expression of a CRT standpoint (Solorzano and Yosso, 2002). In the academic context, CRT contests traditional approaches to critical studies, especially where such studies challenge power relations without necessarily challenging racialised relations. Professional environments, with their cloaks of authenticity, must also not be overlooked by anti-racists: they regularly remain uncontested due to their ability to self-perpetuate and validate such practices. King (2004a) utilises narratives to illustrate how the experiences and identities of sport coaches are structured by whiteness processes, just as the case studies of Long et al. (1995, 1997, 2000) enable anti-racists to understand the real-world experiences of players in amateur sport by revealing their racialised experiences of playing and administering their sport. Similarly, Burdsey’s (2007) use of narrative enables a demystifying of myths and stereotypes of Asians in sport. Far from essentialising experiences and reducing


or economism. What I mean here is that we cannot at the expense of being professional and having our sport contribute positively towards the national priorities, allow the wealthy few to determine the direction of sport at the expense of our people [Emphasis added]. (Stofile, 2009)


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the diversity of ethnic groups, CRT approaches to counter-narratives give anti-racists a better understanding of complex lives and histories. As CRT is anti-essentialist and anti-reductionist, anti-racism is recognised as not the domain of any one social group, though the experiences of particular groups are so under-theorised that anti-racists are urged to recognise this disparity. As in the research into the nature and extent of racism in football, the black players are often ‘telling the same stories’ (Long et al., 2000). If we allow space and time to ‘hear’ and understand the force of these voices and the weight of evidence from their mutual narrative, persuasive arguments emerge.

CRT, ‘race’ and sport Anti-racism in sport has been informed by critical sport and leisure studies and, like most versions of critical theory, is underpinned by critiques of domination and oppression. However, what is argued here is that critical sport and leisure studies, in identifying the processes and contradictions within institutions that reinforce oppressive social relations (discourses, ideologies, epistemologies and research), have their anti-racist argument diluted because of their generalist approach to specific oppressions (Singer, 2005; Burdsey, 2007; Hylton, 2009: 38). There is evidence that they consistently fail to consider the constants of ‘race’ and racism that for many are part of their everyday world. It could be argued that the dominant concepts, theories or ‘tools’ used to interrogate oppression do not adequately consider ‘race’, racism and ant-iracism in sport. For many ‘race’, racism, anti-racism and the black experience were/are marginal or ignored. Some would say these issues are ‘bolted on’ to critical debates rather than inherent. Sport and leisure theory, policy and practice can be seen as willing to accept and facilitate systems that duplicate popular discourses and ignore new or radical ideas. However, the prevalence of racism in sport has had limited but consistent attention from which to establish the racialised within this significant cultural product (Burley and Fleming, 1997; Watson and Scraton, 2001; Williams, 2001; Carrington and McDonald, 2001a; Zirin, 2007; Spracklen, 2008). There are emerging examples of CRT approaches being used to challenge inequalities in sport. Such approaches are uncommon in sport and leisure research and practice because they dispense with some very significant preliminaries that have caused anti-racism, diversity and equality initiatives to be incremental in nature, slowing the pace of change (Spracklen et al., 2006). Critical Race Theorists are essentially pragmatists whose experience and reading of academic and policy text and of socio-historical events concede that racism is endemic within society. However, constantly trying to demonstrate the existence of racism in society before action is taken can lead to a drain on resources, sustaining fewer challenges to the status quo.


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Where a critical race theory approach has been used in sport, an inherently anti-racist perspective has been utilised. Burdsey’s (2007) analysis of football explores football’s exclusion of British Asians, which could be described as a series of racial projects leading to the racial formation that is the reinforcement of whiteness in mainstream grassroots as well as the professional game. British Asians are heavily involved in sport, especially football, and yet their exclusion from the game at the highest levels, beyond a handful of professional players, remains a mystery. Myths and stereotypes surrounding British Asians around physicality and sporting competence, diet and religion, parental influence and careers dominate the way their exclusion is framed. Racist practices are justified by commonsense explanations of self-exclusion and cultural dissonance reinforcing further a specific kind of colour-blindness that excludes British Asians. Part of this denial is based upon the symbolic constructions of inclusion through valorising African–Caribbean role models who have reached the highest levels, despite their numbers being restricted amongst those who administer and officiate the game at all levels (Long et al., 2000; Back et al., 2001; Hylton, 2005; Burdsey, 2007). Williams (2001) goes on to argue that the prevalence of whiteness in positions of power in sport has been put down to natural propensities, therefore justifying ambivalence to inequalities and power differentials that support a rationale for the status quo in sport management and administration. Back et al. (2001: 8) are not likely to be surprised by the findings of Burdsey (2007), King (2004b) and others critical of the pervasive racism in football, especially as their research has identified racialised presences and absences. They further describe a confused and sometimes Janus-faced profession unable to articulate what anti-racism is, beyond ‘a good idea’, while simultaneously being prepared to deny or trivialise racism and its impacts. This is not unique to football: cricket has also been criticised for its ‘limited view of what constitutes racism in the game and from an ignorance of the prevalence and operation of racism at the recreational level’ (Carrington and McDonald, 2001b: 51). As a starting-point for sports like cricket and football, Garland and Rowe (2001) urge anti-racists to engage with everyday constructions of ‘race’ in a way that acknowledges its complex manifestations (racisms) and, in particular, the dynamic process of racialisation which has been lacking from many strategies in sport.

Sport against racism Ireland, racism(s) and anti-racism(s)


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There is not one racism but racisms, which are nuanced and complex, under the radar and quite squarely on the radar. Consequently there can be no one answer to racism and therefore no version of anti-racism can be perceived as the answer. Racism in sport and society today has evolved into many versions and continues to evolve, reinvent itself and remain a slippery moving


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target for anti-racists inside and outside sport. If there ever was a debate on the correct response to racism the answer would have to be pragmatic; a correct version of anti-racism is bespoke. It may have applications elsewhere and be hailed as exemplary good practice, but a ‘correct version’ of antiracism only weakens the notion of anti-racism and simplifies the range of activities that fall under the umbrella of ‘anti-racism’. CRT forces an engagement with these complex issues, as they cannot be ignored if interventions are to avoid perpetuating the stereotypes and myths that have grown up around sport. For SARI and other anti-racism organisations, the significance of ‘race’ in society is fiercely emphasised in sport as ‘real’, even though it is consistently argued by those critical of society that ‘race’ in itself is socially constructed. So the paradox of ‘race’ is that it is both real for many and yet unreal in its most basic scientific essence. For many critical of racialised social relations there is the problematic of the pervasiveness of racialised discourses that are effortlessly maintained in everyday contexts. The notion of ‘race’ for many is attractive for many reasons: (a) it reinforces superior and inferior perceptions of the ‘other’ that maintain racial hierarchies; (b) myths and belief systems have been built upon the notion of ‘race’ from respectable sources in the professions and education; (c) the media regularly bombard us with messages that reinforce these belief systems; and (d) there are always examples available to ‘prove’ that these myths and beliefs have some foundation. Reinforcing ‘race’ as real comes with propositions about physical and mental propensities in sport that affect who plays and who stays; where and what people play; who is coached and who is the coach; who are the ‘we’ and who are the ‘they’. Anti-racists must therefore be careful to problematise their conceptual starting points. In the past the prevalence of sectarianism in Ireland generated a myth about stratification that left no room for racism, but recent events have disturbed this view. After a Romanian family had been targeted in a series of racist attacks in south Belfast in 2009, racism and anti-racism in Ireland were brought into sharp relief when the Finance Minister for the Democratic Unionist Party, Sammy Wilson, accused anti-racism groups of exaggerating the problem in order to get money because they were running short of funds. Wilson’s remarks may be alluding to high profile closures like that of the NCCRI, which closed in 2008, ‘the year of intercultural dialogue’. The right-wing group Combat 18 was reported to be involved in racist attacks, after tensions erupted following a World Cup qualifier between Northern Ireland and Poland at Windsor Park in March 2009. It was reported that:


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It is becoming more and more apparent that these attacks are more than just isolated incidents, but are part of an orchestrated attempt to force people from the area. (Belfast Telegraph, 2009)


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The vitriol and bile that spews forth from the most overt racist forms of abuse have to be confronted by organisations like SARI in tandem with the more subtle systematic institutionalised forms. These variegated manifestations of racialised practices fix ‘everyday ideas’ about the Other, public morality and political priorities. These everyday ideas must be the starting point for anti-racist interventions, because although ‘race’ is the social construction, the actions and impact of racial thinking must be the target of anti-racist work. Those who deny racism, or evoke the notion of ‘race’ uncritically or loosely, reflect the ease with which racial conflict in sport and wider society is maintained.

Microaggressions and sport Critical race theorists have been forceful in forwarding the notion of ‘microaggressions’: racialised phenomena that accentuate the incremental nature of everyday racialised ‘events’. Though microaggressions have been the focus of some of the analysis in sport theorising they have not been developed beyond general description. King’s (2002, 2004a, 2004b) analyses of football coaching explicitly consider the microaggressions inflicted on black coaches in football culture, just as Burdsey (2004a, 2004b) identifies how the subordination of Asian cultures to the superiority of whiteness forces a reinvention of Asian player identities. These microaggressions are outlined by Long and Hylton (2002), whose analysis of whiteness in sport identified processes that Wing Sue et al., (2009) would consider to be microaggressions. An adapted version of Long and Hylton’s (2002) ‘indicators of whiteness’ underlines the consistent claims of players who have experienced racism in sport who can be fairly sure that when they play sport people will not always be pleasant to them where ‘race’ is concerned; that they are not likely to see people like themselves represented in administration and management; that at social functions there will not be refreshments that reflect their culinary preference; that they will have to educate their teammates on the existence of institutional racism; that if they do well in sport they are likely to be presented as role models; that talking to the ‘person in charge’ will mean talking to someone who is white; that they may have to worry about racist behaviour putting them off their game; that if they express themselves in sport people will attribute how they play to their ‘race’; and that if they play in a single-‘race’ team they are likely to be accused of being separatist and not wanting to integrate. The power of microaggressions is most fundamental where power is wielded whether literally or symbolically by the dominant over the subordinate/oppressed.


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Racial microaggressions are similar to unconscious racism, but they are broader, describe a dynamic interplay between perpetrator and recipient,


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Wing Sue et al., (2009: 183) argue that the impacts of these microaggressions can lead to emotional harm that is sometimes referred to as ‘spirit injury’. Harm can be evidenced by mental and physical health issues, a hostile or invalidating environment; perpetuate stereotype threat; physical health issues; and lower productivity. In the spirit of C.L.R. James, anyone who ‘knows sport’ knows that racism in society is pervasive, and the microaggressions outlined by Long and Hylton (2002), and the events played out by King (2004a, 2004b) and (Burdsey, 2004a) are not unusual in sport either. CRT urges anti-racists to be vigilant because the accumulated emotional costs of small acts can be easily misunderstood, ignored or discounted, except by those who experience them. Those who have been humiliated by a joke, an off-hand comment or some other action that could be construed as ‘low impact’, ‘ambiguous’ or ‘ethically excusable’ would understand that the totality of these experiences could constitute the last ‘trivial’ racist act, the tipping point. SARI’s ‘Brian Kerr Intercontinental League’ is one effort to reduce the chances of the microaggressions that can occur where vulnerable groups are left isolated in traditional leagues. This league, endorsed by the highprofile former national team manager, Brian Kerr, invites ‘new communities’ to establish football teams (male and female). Each team is encouraged to work within its own community to network, empower and build capacity for a sustainable and successful club or community. As part of this process of intra-cultural community development the teams play each other as part of an inter-cultural process of mutual respect and integration. An opportunity for social groups to gain confidence in sport and to interact with others on their own terms is a useful starting point where ‘race’ and difference have been seen to motivate hostilities amongst less tolerant individuals or communities. Who is to know which act(s) caused a particular social group to set up their own sports league and play amongst themselves? Who can say, without knowledge of Others’ complex lives, that their protectionism is invalid? CRT encourages us not to simplify but to understand these racialised experiences, privilege these marginalised voices and allow them to inform anti-racist practice. Caution has to be exercised so that anti-racist dogma regarding dominant ideologies informing, for example, integration, multiculturalism or separation is not allowed to flourish as the answer.


and focus primarily on their everyday active manifestations. (Wing Sue et al., 2008: 329)

Sport against racism in Ireland Where critical race theorists argue that there are many versions of racism and therefore many anti-racist responses, these must be predicated on a critical


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understanding of the assumptions underpinning each response. CRT holds that anti-racist responses cannot view racism as static or ahistorical. Racism evolves and racisms have a history, which must be understood before a stance is adopted and resources deployed. Further, anti-racists should not restrict their activities to the observable, nor should they see their work as solely focused on individual behaviour or reduce their responses to ‘one trick’ regulatory measures. CRT encourages anti-racists like SARI to be: (1) proactive – perhaps through the use of positive action (2) prepared to challenge established ways of working – perhaps through encouraging entities to look at themselves as complicit in reproducing racism rather than seeing problems ‘over there’ (3) not accepting all anti-racism as valid – some anti-racist interventions can be ambiguous, superficial, or leave racialised assumptions undisturbed. Since it was established, SARI has been involved in the development of a series of national, European and international initiatives to challenge racism in sport on different levels. As early as 1997, SARI represented Ireland at the Madrid conference of the European Union Year Against Racism and participated in the International Conference in Stockholm, during which the Charter of Practice in European Sport was established. In 1999, SARI became one of the founders of Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), which is supported by every national football federation in Europe and featured very prominently in the 2006 World Cup in Germany. In 2000, SARI was invited by the Council of Europe and British Council to contribute to a major conference in Strasbourg on the Social Responsibility of Sport, which led to the Bratislava Agreement (see NAPAR). SARI was also an active partner in the 2004 European Year of Education through Sport and in January 2005 hosted two high-profile workshops as part of that initiative. A substantial amount of SARI’s work is focused on the fourth of the five objectives of the National Action Plan Against Racism strategy (2007). This objective was established to enhance the recognition and awareness of diversity, and advocated using the media and the arts, sport, and tourism to this end. Drawing on the work of Solórzano and Yosso (2005), I outline three kinds of anti-racism with varying degrees of utility for anti-racist groups like SARI (Hylton, 2009). Some anti-racist approaches accept the inevitability of racism and are more likely to try to avoid antagonism through intervention. This position was labelled ‘magical consciousness’ because successful interventions are very unlikely if left up to others. Similarly the middle ground labelled ‘naïve consciousness’ challenges those affected by racism to work harder to integrate or comply with the system as it is. This approach takes the path of least resistance and though it may broaden some views of the system or subordinating structures, may not offer strategies to disrupt these processes. A ‘critical consciousness’ is more closely aligned to a CRT


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perspective and is prepared to challenge systems, organisations and individuals to change their behaviours. Resources are also likely to be redistributed according to historical inequalities rather than purely regulated or simply distributed. The social context for SARI is that an influx of new communities, especially from Eastern Europe, has been the backdrop to many of the antiracism initiatives in Ireland. Since SARI’s inception, Ireland has become a country of net inward migration for only the second period in its history, and much of this is bound up with its new membership of the European Union and the expansion of the Union over the recent past. It is estimated that between 10 and 14% of the Irish population is now made up of nonIrish nationals (Lynam, 2008; NCCRI, 2009). However, McDonald (2008: 1) observes that: With a drop of close to 25 % in Ireland’s once booming construction industry, fears are also rising that concerns over job losses, the ‘credit crunch’ and the still high cost of living will produce an unprecedented wave of racism and xenophobia. The Polish community in Ireland, which is estimated at around 230,000, is experiencing the largest exodus of workers back either to their homeland or other parts of the EU in search of work. A Dublin club that SARI was instrumental in establishing, Transylvania FC, made up of Romanian workers, has a rapidly depleting squad due to a number of its players leaving to go home or to other EU cities such as London for better opportunities. The racism that has become the focus for SARI and the NAPAR in Ireland is manifest through racism experienced by travellers, by black and minority ethnic people, and by recent migrants, including labour migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers; racism experienced by Jews and Muslims in the form of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and the intersection of racism with other forms of discrimination. In Ireland’s largest study on the experience of racism and discrimination by immigrants, research by Mcginnity et al., (2006: v) reported that a third (35%) had experienced harassment in public spaces (over half, 53%, for the black south/central Africans) which has implications for people’s perceptions of places for sport and leisure. Bairner (2004) and Geoghegan (2008) have considered the complexities of anti-racism in Northern Ireland, particularly where issues of sectarianism and the inexorable longevity of these divisions shape the nature of racisms and therefore anti-racism. Geoghan sketches out a landscape of discourses engaging with multiculturalism and anti-racism where previously sectarianism was central to issues of diversity, difference and division. Similarly, Bairner (2004) cites the contradictions implicit in the North of Ireland


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where sectarian difference is institutionalised and is the unspoken backdrop to separate celebrations of social inclusion and diversity. For SARI, the simple celebration of multiculture becomes an awkward activity in sometimes contested social spaces divided by sectarianism (Geoghegan, 2008). Religious/political affiliations are not only problematic domains for consumers but also for providers, and have serious implications for the range and quality of sport provision for all. For SARI to be effective it cannot take an ahistorical approach to anti-racism in Ireland. The sociopolitical history of Ireland cannot be ignored in any anti-racism intervention, though SARI recognises in its objectives that it cannot be colour-blind, especially where Ireland’s demographic shifts have become the source of concern in terms of racism.

Community development and SARI SARI incorporates a community development philosophy underpinned by an integrationist ethic. SARI was established to support cultural integration and social inclusion in Ireland by using sport as a medium to combat racism, xenophobia, sectarianism and other forms of discrimination. Community development has historically been focused on social justice and social change while offering a challenge to racism, poverty and marginalisation (Paulo, 2003). The NAPAR strategy emphasises the need for SARI to be vigilant around four manifestations of racism: (a) discrimination; (b) assaults, threatening behaviour and incitement; (c) institutional/systematic forms of racism; and (d) labelling. The main aims of SARI’s strategic plan are to present sporting and cultural events that bring together people from different cultures and backgrounds; to produce materials for use in schools and sports clubs to help educate young people on issues of racism; to promote a positive attitude towards people from different ethnic backgrounds; to work with local sports clubs encouraging equality for all people regardless of colour, religion or any other form of discrimination; to integrate black and minority ethnic groups through sport. Further, in the Brian Kerr Intercontinental League, mainstream teams are invited by SARI to actively ‘poach’ and play against the Intercontinental teams as part of this process of inter-cultural détente and integration. The Community Development Exchange (CDX, 2009: 1) states that Community development starts from the premise that within any community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience, which, if used in creative ways, results in high levels of participation, and can be channelled into collective action to achieve the communities’ desired goals. Community development workers work alongside people in communities, build relationships with key people and organisations to facilitate the identification of common concerns, and help build autonomous


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Community development has an emphasis on sustainability and selfreliance, which SARI is attempting to put in place as a result of developing its volunteer base. Though the Intercontinental League has succeeded in raising the profile of anti-racism in sport, SARI recognises that for anti-racist activity to continue it must empower others to continue this process of positive change. Sustainable anti-racism in this case involves SARI identifying and working with committed volunteers in Ireland who are willing to accept responsibility for anti-racism. Community self-help is a cornerstone of community development and presents opportunities for SARI and its network to grow exponentially when they get this model right. SARI acknowledged that for it to achieve maximum impact for its antiracism messages, football, however popular, could be only one of its tools. In many respects it could be argued that SARI operates with an anti-racism ‘plus sport’ model rather than sport development ‘plus anti-racism’ as a by-product. This can be seen in SARI’s most popular activity, the Soccerfest, which it has been organising since 1997. Over 2000 people attend the annual tournament, which in 2009 was partnered with Concern Worldwide’s kite festival to raise awareness around child labour in addition to its usual antiracism messages to multiple communities. The profile of the competition for men and women is emphasised by the continued recognition and patronage of people like Conor Lenihan (Minister for Integration) who recently launched the two-day Soccerfest. SARI has consistently stretched traditional notions of how an anti-racism in sport organisation should operate as it widens its remit from football, to sport, to cultural activities and beyond [SARI also changed its name from Soccer Against Racism Ireland]. In the past SARI has organised a Multicultural Mardi Gras and National Lunch Day, which facilitated refugee families going to lunch with families all over Ireland to watch the GAA All-Ireland Final in their homes. In addition, SARI has organised Multicultural Sports Days in Dublin attracting over 1,000 people to play and watch nine sports from capeoira to hurling. One of the central tenets of CRT is social justice and the outcomes of social transformation that emerge from it. The way SARI has embraced the community development principles of social justice within its community development paradigm can be viewed through policy documents, its sporting events and in some cases through direct action. Social justice is generally seen to be underpinned by challenging oppression in terms of racialised actions and attitudes in sport. SARI has been involved in a range of anti-racist interventions. Some involve the endorsement of action against racism in the form of signing up to charters such as the Charter Against


groups. They create opportunities for non-formal learning, which will help to increase the capacity of communities. By enabling people to act together, community development workers help to foster social inclusion and equality.


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Racism in Sport launched in 2003. The Charter was supported by other key stakeholders in the Irish sport policy community, including national governing bodies, anti-racism organisations and sports councils.

SARI’s workers believe that some of its work is too radical and challenging for mainstream funding organisations like local authorities, who prefer more liberal initiatives and perhaps less controversial endeavours such as the campaigning organisation Show Racism the Red Card. SARI’s work is not just about what happens in the stadium but also about wider issues than sport, on the street, which sometimes takes SARI into highly charged or politically sensitive arenas with immigration departments, the police, and law courts: for SARI, individuals suffering racism need support whether within or beyond sport. An important aspect of SARI’s work is the building of social capital as the key to social inclusion and integration into Irish society. Definitions of social capital emphasise the strength of social ties and networks in sport as major factors for groups achieving full participation in sport (Nicholson and Hoye, 2008). SARI can boast working with and bringing together Palestinians and Israelis, clans from the Ivory Coast, factions from Poland, Nigerians and Chinese. In addition the lunch days, Mardi Gras, Soccerfests and leagues have been instrumental in encouraging a dialogue between new and established communities in Ireland. Their view is that these community cohesion activities can be effective. Their reasons for this are that initiatives like the Intercontinental League can offer opportunities for promoting racial dialogue, dispelling stereotypes, dissipating hostilities and fostering harmony. This process can occur as a result of intra-community relationships being strengthened through the enhancement of bonding capital, and inter- community relationships being developed through a process of bridging capital. Both have been considered as factors that impact individual and group participation in sport (Nicholson and Hoye, 2008; Hylton, 2008). SARI staff are aware of the accusations that they could be reinforcing separatism through encouraging intra-cultural sport, but they are willing to accept that this is part of a process of establishing confidence and respecting identities as they work towards wider integration and inter-cultural dialogue. Further, Gutierrez et al., (1996: 503) argue that acknowledging their own culture helps people to recognise its significance for others. The notion of respecting cultural diversity incorporates a reflexivity that does not limit the direction of this activity to a narrow majoritarian perspective. From SARI’s standpoint, valuing difference is a process encouraged within and across politically identified social groups, not forgetting that there is as much diversity in one as the other. Similarly, Geoghegan’s (2008) view that an inclusive anti-racism in Ireland should include all identities challenges


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Conclusion A Critical Race Theory approach has been used to frame SARI and antiracism in sport. As a relatively new approach to viewing social process and formations in sport its demystification here outlines its potential as a framework for anti-racists. CRT’s pragmatics and critique of the everydayness of ‘race’ and racism reflect a realist approach to sport and anti-racism that establishes a requirement for anti-racists to be critical, willing to challenge established ways of working, and to be proactive/radical rather than liberal/ incremental. Anti-racists like SARI are challenged to further consider important issues surrounding ‘race’, racism and anti-racism before deploying ‘off the shelf’ approaches to what should be bespoke interventions. Just as SARI’s context, policy and practice has wider implications for anti-racism, we must consider the settings, particularity and potentially wider application of other exemplars in this collection and elsewhere for ideas. CRT presents a useful framework from which to operate in terms of its focus on social justice and transformation. CRT’s approach to racism as endemic and normalised in wider society establishes a clear, unambiguous position for anti-racist organisations like SARI. Microaggressions are commonplace and sport must be alive to this fact, thus setting the context for racist acts as the tip of the iceberg. SARI’s conscious recognition of the pervasiveness of racism, microaggressions and diversity issues ensures that colour-blindness is challenged. Where colour-blindness is practised it only marginalises further those affected by a range of racisms and therefore versions of anti-racism must respond to specific issues in sport and the wider community. Clearly the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, which is why SARI cannot afford to be lost to sport, due to sport and governments’ relatively poor performance in adhering to consistent anti-racist messages. In Ireland the loss of the NCCRI and the abandoning of the National Action Plan Against Racism has dealt a significant blow to the status and profile of anti-racism in the country, reinforcing the need for SARI to maintain its focus in this sector. In its work SARI accepts conflict because it comes with the territory. At the same time SARI manages this conflict to effect positive change, but where the public purse is under pressure will policymakers and practitioners welcome this attention? There are obvious ramifications here surrounding the politics of SARI’s funding. SARI exists in a context where


colour-blindness and becomes a position to work towards. Encouraging the bonding capital within groups facilitates an empowerment process that enhances the control of sports participation for otherwise disempowered groups. Sport is participated in on their terms, thus redressing power imbalances within sports and the associated microaggressions that may follow where individuals are isolated and vulnerable.


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conflict is never too far away. In some cases that conflict is invited so that it can be confronted, and in others the reaction to racism must avoid kneejerk responses if long-term change is to be the result; it is often at these critical points of reaction to incidents that anti-racism in sport falls short. SARI’s critical consciousness, situatedness and reflexivity make it an antiracist organisation aware of wider social, economic and political forces in which its work is set, and as a result it strategically challenges itself and others to work in a way to counter the racism(s) pertinent to its clients. The extent to which SARI can use this conflict constructively is likely to determine its overall success.

Note This chapter draws in part upon a paper to be published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport.


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Twenty years ago, Jarvie (1991: 4) insisted that research on ‘race’ and sport had paid insufficient attention to power relations and ‘the role of sport in either consolidating or challenging the racist values of various groups’. At that time he was working with a literature on ‘race’ and sport that was still sparse. The literature has certainly grown in the intervening years, and this collection makes a further contribution, but it still represents an underresearched and under-theorised area of study (Long et al., 2009). This pattern of growing, but less than whole-hearted, interest is reflected in the realms of sports policy and practice. Jarvie’s point about the lack of attention to power relations is a telling one. Racism is inescapably related to power, and typically those with power are reluctant to give it up. Sometimes concessions are made to make sure that the underlying structures can remain essentially unchanged. Thus the sporting authorities might be prepared to allow minority ethnic athletes to bring them success, or take action against a differently othered segment, hooligan supporters, without allowing people from black and minority ethnic communities true equality within the corridors of power.

A change for the better? We started by observing that progress needed to be assessed alongside informed considerations of sporting cultures and policy processes. When we examine the implications of anti-racism initiatives for power relations as against the face issues, we should then ask the obvious question: has anything changed in terms of racism in sport during the same two decades since Jarvie’s observation? If that is interpreted as asking whether racism has been removed from sport/society, the answer is clearly ‘no’. While the Apartheid link between ethnicity and political power discussed in this volume by Wagg (Chapter 3) and Ramsamy (Chapter 4) has been disrupted, and there is less racist abuse (for example, of the kind once associated with football, as detailed in this book by Thomas in Chapter 12) – and we should not


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undervalue that – other forms of racism persist. In this book, the dynamics of power relations are clearly visible in the struggles between institutions, campaigners and black and minority participants in sport. All the chapters in this book show this: Andersson (Chapter 10), for example, is clear about the constraints within Norwegian sport – and the re-imagining of minority ethnic athletes as the Other – which are a reflection of wider societal structures. The overt expression of racist attitudes may no longer be seen by (white) people in sport as socially acceptable (or respectable), but belief in, and desire for, ‘race’ (Daynes and Lee, 2008) is still embedded in the social practices of sport. The Apartheid regime in South Africa may be over, but the legacy of division is strong. There have still been only a few black players selected to play for the national cricket or rugby union teams. We might ask how much those institutions have changed, but we might also ask why black athletes would want to be associated with what they have stood for. Similarly, as and Foley, Taylor and Maxwell argue in Chapter 11, Australia has a history of marginalising women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the playground of Australian sport; and although sport can be used to address issues of historic marginalisation, discrimination and exclusion, they conclude that racism and sexism still exist in Australian sport, as in the wider Australian community. Nearer to home, it has taken a long time for Yorkshire County Cricket Club to make any inroads in overcoming its previously racist reputation. Academics and other commentators do seem agreed that in the UK, at least, the level of naked abuse is less now than it was in the sport of the 1980s and 1990s. But if we were to content ourselves with that as a measure of progress we would be guilty of Jarvie’s charge: of ignoring power relations and the structure of society. In light of recent observations about the lack of black and minority ethnic representation at the level of organisational leadership in sport, a newcomer to the field might be forgiven for assuming that this is a newly emergent issue. They would be wrong; it has been on the agenda for a long while (for example, Cashmore, 1982). Policies, of course, have to be more than the written documents. In the UK it is increasingly the norm for major sports organisations to have equality policies. Sometimes staff work really hard to implement these; sometimes they do not. In the opening chapter we observed how many of our research participants showed reluctant acceptance of racism on the pitch; there was a resigned recognition that kind of thing happens. But they felt a real sense of betrayal if a sporting institution like the national governing body failed to fulfil its responsibilities in line with its own equality policies. We are anxious that the jaundiced experiences that some people have of particular anti-racism initiatives should not detract from the need to challenge racism in and through sport. For that project to be successful requires


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a more sophisticated understanding of the different forms of racism that extend far beyond the aggressive behaviour of (far right) hooligans, or the similarly narrow focus in Australia of on-field abuse of players by players (Adair and Stronach, Chapter 8). How should we judge effective intervention? In an earlier draft Thomas suggested that while a parade of anti-racist banners might be greeted with polite applause it might be dismissed as inconsequential by others. He went on to ask whether this is the fate of any ‘official’ anti-racist initiative, to be rejected by those it is intended to reach as part of an unwanted attempt by ‘them’ to tell ‘us’ what to think. There is an important distinction between something that strengthens racist resolve and something that is simply being dismissed as irrelevant to them. Whatever the reaction of the hardbitten racist, an initiative that gives ordinary people the confidence to challenge racism is to be highly prized. Having said that, the campaign Thomas presents to us was born of a frustration at the lack of action by any of the football authorities or the club; maybe they would have been less inclined to take the initiative had there been an even moderately successful official challenge to the racists. And if most people have worked out that ‘you can’t say that any more’ because to do so means being labelled a racist, is that sufficient? Well, clearly it is not enough on its own, but it is an important step to signal that the casual racism it would otherwise represent is no longer acceptable. Given the power of language, it is not simply ‘political correctness gone mad’. The Independent Football Commission was so taken with the apparent progress in combating racism in English soccer that in its final report (IFC, 2008: 46) it referred to a quantum leap in a short period of time. It is pleasing to note that they felt able to draw such a conclusion, but then they did also advocate that ‘the FA’s hugely successful [sic] approach to homophobia’ should be adopted in other areas of diversity and equal opportunity. They also noted: Indeed, the IFC feels that football can be looked upon as a shining example of how diversity and equal opportunities can be integrated into an area that is both a workplace and a source of entertainment for hundreds of thousands of people. (IFC, 2008: 46) By the time of its culmination, the IFC had lost its critical edge and become apologist-in-chief for the complacent elements in the sport, noting that:



Some feel the racist message is now giving out a wrong impression and that as long as racism is being mentioned in the same breath as football, the game will appear tainted and racist. (IFC, 2008: 48)


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... the anti-racism message needs to be re-branded. The continual emphasis on this point infers that racism is still a major problem within the sport and may discourage people who have no first hand experience of attending football matches in the current environment, from going to stadia. (IFC, 2008: 48) Being able to deal with denial (that there is a failing that needs to be addressed) is an important attribute of any successful anti-racism initiative (Long, 2000) – as Hylton demonstrates very clearly in Chapter 15.

Resistance Some writers (for example, Carrington, 1998a) have argued that sport should not be seen simply as a site of repression, but also one of resistance. That resistance might take the form of: ●

●

● ●

●

direct confrontation (some of Carrington’s respondents were using sport to exact physical retribution on white players, a theme also apparent in our interviews with black rugby league players – see Long et al., 1995) strategic withdrawal to compete in a separate league or ethnically homogeneous team/club to escape some elements of racism (of course, an all-Asian team, for example, may attract exaggerated racism) demanding changes in sporting structures and procedures demanding representation in sports governance to try to pull the levers of power sustaining stronger identities less susceptible to the slings and arrows of racism

In the current context we need to consider whether such resistance delivers any change or is no more effective than throwing snowballs at the moon. In Bradbury’s contribution (Chapter 13), we can see from just one case study of one anti-racism scheme at one football club, that years of hard work resisting racism is easily undermined by a single off-hand remark by a white employee of the institution. Such action is likely to make sport unattractive as a site for minority ethnic individuals to explore their own sense of self and place. At the same time, however, retreating from ‘mainstream’ sport, while immediately rewarding in the short term (in the sense that there is then little or no racist abuse to endure) is problematic in itself, as it sidesteps the real problems of racism and power in any given sport. This retreat,


This is similar to the message Bradbury (2001a) was getting from clubs at the millennium: that message was challenged by the IFC in its first few years (it ran from 2002–2008). Instead, in their final report they supported the conclusion of a student project, Spicing up the Stadium:


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in turn, then duplicates those problems as they are constructed in wider society. As Malik (2009) has argued, racism and discrimination can never be dealt with by retreating into an identity politics of hermetically-sealed difference, but only by confrontation and refutation of social injustice. Actions that encourage people from minority ethnic groups to develop a positive view of their identity through sport, and thereby enhance selfesteem, may not reduce racism; indeed it may even increase it, if members of minority ethnic groups become more likely to resist the racism they encounter and, in turn, cause a reaction. It is, however, likely to change the nature of the experience of participation, and may start to disrupt dominant force fields. The immediate reaction to the decision by Chuck, Brooks’ local basketball legend (Chapter 9), to put loyalty above financial reward in order to play for a team of Black players, is one of respect. However, were a white basketball player to make exactly the same decision and back out of playing for a team of mixed ethnicity in order to represent an all-white team, there might be many who would interpret it as a separatist act of disrespect to the players of different ethnicities. There might be similarities, but this is not ‘exactly the same decision’; context is all, and once again the power relations at play are crucial to understanding what is happening. In the UK, as in Australia, there has been much debate about the wisdom and/or appropriateness of separate teams and even leagues for minority ethnic communities. This mirrors the arguments around women’s sections and black sections in the trade union and political movements of the late 1970s and 1980s. Such sporting arrangements are criticised for fostering ethnic separatism and fuelling division rather than using the integrative power of sport. Acknowledged as mechanisms for encouraging bonding, they are found wanting in terms of bridging. Lying behind this formulation is the standpoint that integration is a problem of the minority groups, rather than the majority grouping. If the establishment of such teams/leagues is a response to racist sporting environments, that is understandable in its own right. There is much interest in the academic and policy literature in social capital, and how sport might be used to bring different communities together (for example Collins et al., 2007). The theory is simple: where there are changes in demographics, or socio-economic differences between different groups in a particular locality, which potentially result in a decline in social capital, sport is seen as the perfect carrier of bonding capital (forming a sense of belonging) and bridging capital (helping bring different communities together to form one cohesive, trusting community with shared values). In practice, of course, it is not so easy to see how these steps work: in Andersson’s contribution (Chapter 10), for example, there is a sense that Norway’s sports institutions are struggling to provide bridging capital between different Norwegian communities (white and minority ethnic).




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The ordering of bonding, bridging and linking capital is not a chance one. Until people have been able to develop bonding capital, the other forms are that much less likely, though clearly not impossible: one is not a necessary condition for the next. Even so, critics of people from minority ethnic communities forming their own social and sporting networks might be able to question why the ‘people like us’ within bonding networks have to be defined by ethnicity rather than some other social variable like class. However, that ‘choice’ can hardly be considered surprising when it is the key dimension by which the dominant society chooses to ‘other’.

Changing categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity In Chapter 14, Cunningham notes that ‘aversive racists will tend to discriminate when the normative structure is weak’. This serves to highlight the potential contribution of anti-racist campaigns in establishing clear markers for expected behaviour. Those working in the field of anti-racism cannot but recognise increasingly complex definitions of racial and ethnic identity (see, for example, Shinew et al., 2006). In social science terms there is increasing appreciation of hybridity, but this may be of less consequence in the anti-racism movement, which recognises how people may experience racism at the slightest hint of otherness. Many political and popular voices call for ‘decategorisation’/ ‘recategorisation’, from Cunningham’s social psychology perspective (see Chapter 14 – though he says recategorisation does not require colourblindness) or Gilroy’s (2000b) argument that the hallmark of any truly non-racist policy is that it should be colour-blind. This is a powerful argument and in some sense a truism, albeit one which points towards a better future where belief in ‘race’ has diminished, and racism has disappeared. van Sterkenburg (Chapter 2) concludes that some critical studies of ‘race’/ racism and sport can be criticised themselves for ‘naturalising’ the status quo through their tendency to predefine race or ethnicity. As Hoberman (1997, 2004) has suggested, despite the continuing publication of research that suggests there is no scientific basis to ‘race’ as a biological category, theories of racial difference continue to be invoked within sport to explain the perceived dominance of black athletes in certain professional sports such as sprint events. From Kane (1971) to the polemical work of Entine (2000), popular literature in sport has publicised ideas about genetic difference and achievement in sport, drawing on scientific papers and using the language of science to bolster their claims. Sociology of sport has provided a powerful critique of the way in which sport normalises beliefs about the essence of racial difference (Cashmore, 1982; Davies, 1990; Hoberman, 1997; Carrington, 1998a; Fleming, 2001; St Louis, 2004; Grainger et al., 2006). What we would like to see in sport is an absence of any racial/ethnic hierarchies, whereas what we have observed amounts only




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to shifts in those hierarchies. Were this change to happen, the absence of racial/ethnic hierarchies in sport might then foster challenges to their perpetuation in society at large. However, until they are absent from society they are unlikely to be absent in sport. And until we can be sure of their absence, colour-blind policy can deliver neither equality nor equity; indeed, Bonilla-Silva (2003) refers to colour-blind racism. Until such time as ‘race’/ colour/ethnicity plays no part in social differentiation, for policy to ignore it will just serve to reinforce the disadvantage it represents. We assert that sport plays a key role in shaping the ‘racial ensemble’, which Daynes and Lee (2008) argue is the necessary relationship between racial ideas, racial practice and the belief in ‘race’. As they put it (ibid., 138–9): What does condition the existence of racial ideas is a process of believing. If there is a belief in race, then there are conditions of validation and reproduction of this belief ... Believing can be seen to be a peculiar process; it postulates the existence of an object (the object of belief) for which there is no scientific evidence. Hence believing operates within a specific regime of legitimacy, based upon the pertinence of the process within a set of social relationships. Described in this way, one can see that sport is a site for the propagation of beliefs in the existence of ‘race’ (from the crude essentialism of the athletics coach to the assumption that certain minority ethnic groups are not interested in a given sport), and a site for the reproduction of racial practices (from racism on the pitch to recruitment of Board members in sport’s governing bodies). In this sense, sport is part of the wider societal racial ensemble.

Who benefits? As Thomas argues (Chapter 12), anti-racism is not just for the benefit of minority ethnic groups. Some may indeed by driven by white man’s guilt (King, 2004a), but it is very far from being a necessary condition for involvement in anti-racism, nor are philanthropy or altruism pre-requisites; Thomas and his fellow fans wanted an environment in which they felt comfortable, where their beliefs in equality and justice were not continually compromised. van Sterkenburg’s contribution on Dutch sports policies (Chapter 2) also demonstrates the need for anti-racism to be supported by all those in society. Society as a whole benefits from sustained policies on anti-racism, even if racism may not necessarily be the same as it was in the second half of the previous century. There is no doubt that patterns of prejudice change as inequalities of power change: movements across national boundaries, globalisation, shifts in economic control, all these and more mean this century’s racisms will be different in form, if not in substance, from the old




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racisms. And if racism were to be removed from sport/society, sadly there is always the danger that it would be replaced by new forms of othering. However, people would at least be armed with knowledge of how to resist and promote social justice. Although continually struggling for survival, the anti-racism organisations we are most familiar with have been expanding their horizons. Having made some progress in persuading professional football clubs to take racial equality more seriously, Kick It Out felt emboldened to take on the government’s generic equality agenda and start working with clubs to promote equality on the basis of gender, sexuality, disability, religion and age. Elsewhere, SARI has extended from football to sport more generally (Hylton, Chapter 15). With the prospect of electoral success for the far right British National Party in the 2009 European elections, Kick It Out ran a campaign under the title ‘Get Your X in the Box’ to encourage the people it ‘spoke to’ to vote. Future challenges to racism It is through our own responsibility to sport that we develop a concern to promote change in the interest of social justice. The possibility of successful change becomes more likely if those prepared to be part of the project recognise that they do not have to operate in isolation. We hope that this book makes a small contribution to spreading an awareness of a wider movement for social change. On the basis of what the contributors have written in this volume, we can begin to identify a manifesto for what anti-racism needs in sport, if it is to have any real chance of tackling racist ideas, practices and beliefs. The manifesto is formed from the following four commitments: ● ● ● ●

Legislation Campaigning Education Action.

Legislation can clearly cut both ways. In this volume, while Tatz (Chapter 7) draws our attention to the travesties that have flowed from some racial legislation, both Bradbury (Chapter 13) and Thomas (Chapter 12) highlight the impact of various Acts of the United Kingdom Parliament that outlaw racist chanting at British football grounds. Our own chapters (Chapters 1 and 5) stress the importance of equality legislation in the United Kingdom, which has pushed sport’s governing bodies and institutions towards embedding and evidencing commitment to tackle racism and promote equality. This push, combined with various links to funding being dependent on providing evidence of change, has led to some real change in British sport. We have acknowledged that even with that legislation in place and injunctions from government departments, there




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remains much work to be done in the United Kingdom to secure equitable sporting structures and practices. Although only partial, this success should still be welcomed, though not accepted complacently as an endpoint. Particularly in light of the strong principles of equality professed by the European Union, we believe that racism in sport should be targeted explicitly through European legislation, which should impose on member countries a series of binding commitments monitored through national legislative bodies. For the rest of the world, a successful European policy of anti-racism in sport should form the basis of international agreements at the level of the United Nations, backed by International Sport Associations such as FIFA and the IOC. This is not going to be easy: to get policy-makers en masse to contemplate legislation (which might compromise their own claims to power) will need a systematic campaign of lobbying, raising awareness and offering solutions. Campaigning needs to be more co-ordinated, across both sports and national boundaries. A coherent campaign against racism in sport would deliver the message at all levels, in all sports, that there is no room for racism anywhere in sport. Were this to be successful in sport, the next step would be to use sport as a campaigning base to challenge racism in other parts of society. The iconic position currently enjoyed by sport makes it well suited to such a role. The campaign, of course, needs to have a message that racism is not just spectator abuse of players, or player abuse of players. As demonstrated by our contributors, racism needs to be understood much more deeply, which leads to the next part of the manifesto: education. Education is inextricably linked to campaigning: getting a message across about the depth and nature of the racial ensemble in sport, the ideas and practices that sustain the belief in ‘race’. Clearly challenges to racism need to be context-specific, but we need to be alert to opportunities for campaigners to learn from the successes of their counterparts elsewhere in the world. If a trans-national campaigning lobby is established, part of its role should be to educate people in sport about the nature and extent of racism in sport: through the creation of education and training resources, interactive websites (using social networking to spread important messages) and workshops. This means more systematic studies, across more nations and sports. It also means more work with schools and colleges to try to ensure that belief in ‘race’ in sport is problematised: here, it becomes a requirement to make links with those who teach teachers and coaches. The final commitment is to action, or rather, direct action. Campaigns against social injustices have always had to rely on direct action, when other means have failed. We hope that improving education, campaigning against racism in sport, and successfully introducing a trans-national legislative or policy framework, will lead to the reduction of racism in sport to such an extent that Gilroy’s utopian vision might become a social reality. Before any of that happens, we support those who take action against




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racism: whether in campaigning in a sport, or working in minority ethnic communities marginalised by the mainstream. Not only that, but we reserve the moral right for campaigners to take more direct action, if necessary. As we write, supporters of Manchester United in England are uniting to boycott the club, or show their anger through the display of certain colours within the ground (green and gold, the colours of Newton Heath, the club’s original name), because of the alleged financial mismanagement of its current owners. If such moral repugnance towards global capitalism leads to direct action, then, we argue that moral repugnance towards racism should likewise be the motivation for similar acts of resistance, disobedience and reconstruction. As we have argued in this manifesto, those with power to campaign against and educate about racism should use that power. As researchers and academics with a political concern with racism (in sport and in society), and with a continuing belief in the need for a strong and clear anti-racism platform, we see this book as one small contribution to the struggle against racism in sport.




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Aborigines/Aboriginal, 12, 100–14, 117–33, 168–9, 173 Affirmative action, 8 Afro-Asian Games, 49, 50 AGARI, 202 ANC, 55–9, 61, 65 anti-apartheid, 57 Anti-Nazi League (ANL), 186, 190–2 anti semitism, 38, 43, 154, 241 anti-vilification legislation, 19 apartheid, 12, 38–47, 59, 62–3, 100, 102, 233, 247–8 anti-apartheid, 39, 55 Archbishop Tutu, 58 Asian, ix, x, xi, 8, 15, 16, 40, 52, 54, 80, 89, 169, 187, 197–8, 201, 205, 208, 211, 232, 234, 236, 238, 250 Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS), 129 Atkinson, Ron, 83, 91–4, 99 Australia, 12, 17, 55, 100, 104–9, 112–14, 117–20, 122–3, 125–6, 131–3, 167–9, 172–6, 179–80, 248–9, 251 Australian Sports Commission, 178 backlash, 171, 195 bananas, 160, 189 Basketball Hall of Fame, 140–2, 145 Blade Rodgers League, 144–6 Blatter, Sepp, 60 bonding/bridging, 209, 244–5, 251–2 Bratislava Agreement, 240 British National Party (BNP), 205, 209, 211, 254 Brooklyn Dodgers, 136, 149 Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sport, 40 career, 54, 104–5, 108, 112, 119–20, 123, 125, 127, 129–33, 137, 143, 145, 160, 215, 236 celebration, 9, 10, 57–8, 89, 98, 106, 200, 242 chants, 89, 187, 214 Charter of Practice in European Sport, 240

citizenship, 151, 155, 165, 179, 181, 202 Citizenship Survey, 12 Civil Rights Movement, 8, 52, 87, 96, 143, 197 Clean Bowl Racism, 11 colonial, 22, 40, 71, 90, 93, 100, 103, 107, 118, 169–70, 173–4 colonialism, xiv, 96, 118, 154, 194, 233 colour-blindness, 91, 93, 230, 233–4, 236, 242, 245, 252–3 Coloureds, 41, 52–3 Combat 18, 193, 237 Commission for Racial Equality, xv, 10, 68–70, 73, 190, 291–2 constructivism, 6 Critical Race Theory (CRT), 13, 229–36, 239–40, 243, 245 critical research, 5 cultural racism, 5, 25, 154, 157, 233 Dallas Cup, 220, 227 denial (of racism), 3, 15, 70, 208, 250 deviant, 25, 112, 193 diaspora, 5, 22, 153 difference, 3, 4, 7–9, 22, 25, 26, 31, 33–4, 68, 75, 79, 85, 90, 96, 97, 99, 125, 135, 155, 164–5, 167, 217, 224, 232, 239, 241, 244, 251–2 disempowerment, 122 diversity, ix, 6, 29, 33, 68–72, 75–6, 78–80, 89, 95, 97, 122, 128, 150, 167, 169, 175–6, 180–1, 210, 214–15, 217, 219, 223–5, 227–8, 235, 240–2, 244–5, 249 England and Wales Cricket Board, 11 Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), 8, 70, 80, 202 Equality Standard, 10, 68–9, 72, 75, 77–80, 203–4 ethnic bonding, 20 Eurobarometer, 12 exotic, xiv, 98


Index

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282 Index

GANEFO, 42, 46, 49 genetic, 27, 62, 102, 123, 125, 127–8, 131–2, 252 Geordies are Black and White, 194 Gilroy, 9–10, 91, 97, 153, 231–2, 255 globalisation, 37, 152–3, 253 governing bodies, ix, xii, 5, 10, 11, 14, 21, 32, 40, 69–71, 73–5, 77–8, 95–6, 190, 201–2, 244, 253–4 Harlem Globetrotters, 136, 139, 142 Harold Macmillan, 37, 39 hidden racism, 161–2 Hit Racism for Six, 11 homophobia, 20, 198, 249 hooligan/hooliganism, 14, 70, 71, 93, 186, 189, 191, 193, 195–6, 200, 202, 247, 249 hoop dreams, 123, 135, 137, 142, 146–8 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 121, 167–8, 176, 178 hybridity, 5, 252 ideology, 23, 26, 43, 84–6, 96, 154, 233 Independent Football Commission (IFC), 249 indigenous people, 117–19, 121–3, 125, 129, 131–4 innate ability, 117, 125, 128 integration, 20, 22–5, 31, 56, 58, 89, 136, 143, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158–9, 163–5, 169, 208, 225–6, 228, 239, 242–4, 251 intersectionality, 5, 96 IOC, 41–52, 54–6, 255

Ireland, 229, 236–7, 239–45 Jim Crow, 87, 103, 140 Kick it Out (KIO), xi, xii, 10, 68–70, 73, 76–7, 79, 95, 185, 188, 190, 199, 202–3, 205–6, 254 Kick Racism out of Football, see Kick It Out King Kong, 91 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 195 language, 13 leadership, xii, 52, 56, 61, 76, 86, 150, 165, 179, 214, 248 Leeds Fans United Against Racism and Fascism, 185, 187, 191 Leeds United, 54, 69, 185–93, 197–8 legislation, 7, 12, 40, 43, 59, 108, 112, 119, 169, 174, 254–5 Macpherson Report, 6, 157 Manchester United, 256 Mandela, 41, 55–9 manifesto, 254–6 Marxism, 84–5, 97–8 Mbeki, 59, 60, 64, 66 multicultural society, 19, 20, 167 multiculturalism, 8, 76, 89, 152, 169, 174, 196, 239, 241 Muslim, 172–3, 179–80 Muslims, 25, 241 National Basketball Association (NBA), 141, 143–4, 146, 156 National Front (NF), x, 186–93 National Olympic Committee of South Africa, 55 National Rugby League (NRL), 118–20, 124–7, 132, 171, 177, 179 nations, 28, 37, 38, 42, 46–9, 52, 93, 111, 169, 255 Nazi, 38, 42–3, 161, 164–5, 189, 191, 195 The Netherlands, 17, 20, 22–3, 27, 32–3, 185 Norway, 17, 150–2, 154–65, 215, 251


fans, x, xi, 10, 11, 15, 17, 69, 88, 94–5, 102, 120, 133, 140, 151, 185–98, 200, 202, 205–9, 211, 216, 253 fanzine, 187, 192–6, 198 FIFA, xi, 60, 255 Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), 11, 67, 240 Football in the Community (FIC), 201–2, 206, 208–11, 213 Football Offences Act, 10 Football Supporters’ Association, 187, 195 Football Unites, Racism Divides, xii, 11, 69, 76 Foxes against Racism, 69, 194, 206

Olympic Games, 38, 43, 47, 50, 54–7, 175 Olympics, vii, xi, 38–40, 42–3, 45–50, 52, 120, 144, 150–1, 164–5, 171


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Other, 3–5, 7, 14, 19, 25–7, 30–4, 76, 85, 98, 100, 124, 215, 217, 237–8, 247–8, 252, 254 outsiders, 189–92, 213 Overbrook High School, 137 physical acumen, 117 plurivocality, 13 policing, 7, 72, 188, 196 political correctness, ix, 9, 14, 120, 210, 249 Popplewell, 189 popular racism, 187 Port Vale, 199, 204–13 positive action, 69, 233, 240 post colonialism, 37, 90, 153 postmodernism, 6 post-racial, 87, 90, 97 Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), xi, 10, 190, 201–2 quota, 60–1 racial difference, 68, 90, 135, 152 Racial Equality Standard, 68–73, 75, 77–8, 80, 199, 203 racial logic, 124 racialisation, 76, 130, 132, 153, 156–7, 165, 230–3, 236 racist chanting, 10, 186–7, 189, 196, 198, 200, 205, 208, 234 racist-hooligan couplet, 193 reconciliation, 59, 60, 65, 118, 132 Red Card Against Racism, 158–60 repatriation, 89 resistance, 16, 40, 42, 70–1, 77, 86, 89, 97, 101, 203, 205, 231, 233, 240, 250, 256 Rock Against Racism, 190 Rugby Football League (RFL), 10, 69 Samaranch, 56 SANROC, 40 SAONGA, 41 SARI, 229, 237–46 SASA, 40 segregation, 12, 16, 39, 41, 62–3, 123, 143, 148–9

283

Self-belief, 128, 133 Separate development, 7, 8, 39, 50, 111 separate teams, 251 Sharpeville, 39 Show Racism the Red Card, xii, 10, 69, 202, 244 Skinheads, 195 social capital, 121, 168, 180–1, 209, 244, 251 social categorization framework, 215, 217, 219, 227 social class, viii, 26 solidarity, 7, 95, 97, 141, 163, 168 South Africa, 12, 17, 37–52, 53–66, 100, 164, 198, 233, 248 A Sporting Future for All, 69 sports/media complex, 84–90 Springbok, 51, 57–9, 61–2, 64 stereotype, 14, 15, 20, 25, 62, 90–1, 92, 123–4, 126, 152, 167, 180, 189, 216, 219, 223, 231, 234, 236–7, 239, 244 Stolen Generations, 118 structures, ix Stuart Hall, 21, 154 suicide, 113 Tackle It, 11, 69, 73, 82 Terror on our Terraces, 189, 192–3 Thatcher, 187, 195 United Nations, 12, 37, 42, 47, 255 United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, 40 utopian, 95–7, 255 Valiants Against Racism (VAR), 204–13 Vogue, 88, 90–1, 98 When Saturday Comes, 194 white privilege, 13, 27, 79, 91–3, 96, 99, 148 Whiteness, 9, 15–16, 26–7, 76, 79, 80, 93–4, 150, 164, 201, 230, 233–4, 236, 238 women, 14–17, 78, 88, 102, 112, 158, 167–8, 170–82, 237, 243, 248, 251


Index

Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 248


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