Prejudice and racial tension

 Prejudice and racial tension.

Listening to a radio  program in which people ring in to air their views, this time the topic was the racial abuse suffered by Raheem Stirling, the Manchester City player on Saturday. Clearly he was at the receiving end of a tirade of expletives as he went to collect the ball near the corner flag. Without question one has to decry the vicious hatred these middle aged white men had towards this black football player. One has to wonder at that part of society and the upbringing that led to this racially warped display of anger, it was visceral and out of control. How, living in a multicultural society can they can feel such anger towards another human being.

One of the callers was Stan Collymore, a mixed race Premier league footballer who played for, amongst others, Liverpool in the late 1990s. He exemplified the deep sense of hurt amongst people of colour regarding the slights they see handed to them, living in this still predominantly white country. Their sense of being called out and made to feel second class permeates their thinking and the things we take for granted, become laced with prejudice by a non white person. It spills out into every corner of their lives, from, in the footballers case, the number of black managers in the sport, given the number of black players who play the game in the top flight.  Collymore even went so far as to complain that black players were pushed out onto the wing or into the less attractive goal scoring positions in the team and forced to make the openings for the likes of Harry Kane. It all sounded far fetched and one could sight the use of white players in the position of fullback but of course it is fallacious to do so. Players of different race in football seem to have either by temperament of physical prowess,  indeed athletics proves the point that by some genetic quirk the middle distance and marathon runners of central Africa are leagues ahead of everyone else. Another example is to see the line up for the 100m sprint race, they are all black men with huge physiques and explosive power. 

There are many objections to his arguments but the one common theme which runs through phone in programs like this is the number of embittered people who are out there living their lives with a grudge. 

I have never suffered a sense of  racism even when I was the only white face in a bar in  Newark in the USA, in a period just after the racial riots had destroyed sections of the town. There was a sense of being somewhat out on a limb, a round peg in a square hole, there was some hostility when I danced (with the encouragement of others around the bar) with one of the lo
cal girls,  but generally, as a Pommy (anglo erectus),  I was a protected species and people went out of their way to befriend me. In another bar, this time in New Orleans, also a black persons bar, (segregation was alive and well in the States in the 60s),the South African guys I was with were very jumpy and left after one drink whilst I stayed on and had a great evening amongst my new found friends.

You see it was a conditioning of the mind which allowed me to stray into a lions den which so terrified the guys from South Africa. They felt totally alien in surroundings which were populated almost wholly by black men because of their childhood prejudice towards black society whilst I had been raised in a home where that type of prejudice was verboten. I simply judged each as an individual and couldn't believe that an individual would threaten me because of the colour of my skin. Ever an optimist and perhaps a little naive, I was blessed to assume because of the colour of my skin that colour didn't matter, although in retrospect it obviously did. There are so many different variations of skin colour and tied up in the skin colour, customs and practices which are as much, if not more so, something to be differentiate by.

And yet the differentiation was not master/slave or for that matter, slave/master but individual to individual. Some people you liked and some you didn't like, some were more easy to communicate with and some quite difficult if ideology got in the way but it was never simply a cohort thing.

Collymores burning resentment about racial bias, having grown up in this country is disturbing given that people of colour have been very successful living and working here. His resentment could be rightfully shared by the poorly educated, poorly equipped white youth from any Northern town who feels he or she has been dealt a poor card in life's journey. Of course the white guy in Bradford can't cry, 'racialism' when his city councillors from Ahmed to Amran and Azam, lots of Hussain's, a Jabal and a Khan or two mixed in with a meagre  sprinkling of Slater, Tait and Swallow's and only one Wainwright represent the population of Bradford in 2018. 

Mr Collymore and his ilk must remind themselves that for the moment the majority lies with the white folk and whilst no one wishes to see the hideous display at the recent football game one has to question the amount of social engineering desired by people who are still in the minority.