CRYSTAL PALACE: THE ISSUE OF RACE CARD
My father’s legacy to me was not just womanising, nor was it only fear and loathing and the sense of being haunted by domestic violence. I have never been proud of him, but I am as proud of my black heritage as I am of coming from the ferociously caucasian working-class area of South Staffordshire. You couldn’t get much more mixed-race than me: part Barbados, but also part Cannock, where the closest you get to soul food is battered cod and mushy peas at the local chippie.
Sometimes I feel thankful I’ve got both sides to draw upon. Sometimes I feel torn apart and isolated, as though I am neither one thing nor the other. Show me two rooms, one with black footballers in it, one with white footballers, and I would pick a room on my own. Sometimes I wonder which culture other mixed-race players like Rio Ferdinand lean towards. I wonder if they share the inner conflict that grips me.
Ambrose Mendy, who used to be Paul Ince’s agent, met me once to try to persuade me to let him act for me. He met me off a plane at Gatwick when I was about to join Nottingham Forest, and the first thing I saw was him surrounded by this entourage of gangsta black dudes looking mean and moody. They thought the black thing was going to work with me but the way they talked and acted was totally alien to me. I was still a boy who had been brought up on an all-white estate in Cannock.
Often, I think I’m lucky. I get immense pride, for instance, from reading about the heroic deeds of the South Staffordshire Regiment at Arnhem during the Second World War. Earlier this year, I drove down through France to visit the beaches where the Allied forces came ashore during the Normandy landings. I wandered around the cemeteries, too, and when I saw how many of the young men killed were from the South Staffs Regiment, it made me well up with pride for their heroism and sacrifice.
I drove inland for a few miles while I was there. Every so often I’d come across the grave of a kid from the South Staffs. Killed on 8 June. A little bit further inland and it might be 9 June. These lads from the Black Country were lasting only a few days as they pushed the Germans back and were then being cut down. It made me think that every child in this country, once they’re old enough to understand the gravity of what happened, should be made to go out and visit those beaches and those cemeteries.
I feel black pride, too. I feel moved when I read about the deeds of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association and the liberation of the realisation that black is beautiful. I am drawn to the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and sometimes I even find myself inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers and the lyrics of bands like Public Enemy. I want to fight the power. Sometimes, I feel black resentment and oppression very keenly.
There is very little recognition, for instance, of the part that black soldiers from the Caribbean played in the Second World War. They joined up in their droves from the West Indies, and the high command decreed that they weren’t allowed to fight against white European Germans because they thought it wasn’t right. Then they come here in the 1950s to fill all the shitty, menial jobs and their reward is that they get spat on and people cross the road to avoid them. Meanwhile, my mate’s grandad, who was a German prisoner of war, stayed on, married a local Staffordshire girl and never got any bother at all. I’m not advocating the idea that he should have got any bother. I’m just trying to point out how unjust that double standard is. I’m just saying how unjust and sad that kind of racism is. My mate’s grandfather had been part of an army that had killed millions of English soldiers and he was accepted. People from the West Indies had fought for Queen and Country and yet they were persecuted. It sickens me to think of it.
So I’m a real mix. I am proud of both sides but I know they contradict each other. If you took your average factory worker in Wolverhampton and an average member of the Nation of Islam, they would have nothing in common. They would hate each other’s guts. But they are part of me. And I think that is a problem that a lot of mixed-race kids have. You don’t have an identity. There is no National Mixed Race Forum. I wouldn’t feel 100 per cent confident going to a Black Nationalist meeting and I certainly wouldn’t feel confident going to a BNP meeting.
I’m not for political correctness. I’m not for positive discrimination. I’m not for having set quotas of black people filling jobs. I’m not for dressing in African gear just because you are black. I don’t want the politically correct telling me off for celebrating St George’s Day. I am proud to be English and I think it’s ludicrous if someone tells me I shouldn’t feel that way. I’d hate to be a white bigot out of fear. I’d hate to see the white man as the enemy. I am fascinated by the strength of character on both sides.
I’m happy the bullying I got when I was a kid hasn’t really left any racial grievances. I’m happy that the victimisation of my mum and me on our little Close faded away. I’m happy that I’ve been able to see attitudes in Cannock and around soften as the years have passed and people have grown used to minorities living with them side by side. Most of the time, I don’t feel any anger or resentment towards the white man. Much of the time, I almost think of myself as a white man. I grew up among them, after all.
But when I see persecution and inequality, it enrages me all the more. When, out of a clear blue sky, Ron Atkinson spits out his poisonous words about Marcel Desailly, it makes me despair. It makes me realise that for all the progress we have made, it’s still there. Still there more than we thought. Still festering in underground minds, still a joke between friends, still okay as long as you don’t get caught, as long as you say it around the dinner table with no politically correct snoops around. Think it, mate, just never say it.
It’s not a surprise to me that Ron Atkinson said what he said about Desailly after the Monaco versus Chelsea Champions League semi-final. I’ve heard plenty of stories about him before. Some of the press boys told me about being on an England trip to Poland with him once. England were playing in Katowice and some of the press lads made the short journey to Auschwitz to see the concentration camp there. When they arrived back at the hotel, most of them, for obvious reasons, were a little subdued. Big Ron was in the foyer. He was boisterous as usual. He wanted to know what was the matter with them all that they were all looking so fucking miserable. One of them told him where they’d been. ‘I suppose you went there by fucking train an’ all,’ he said. Nice one. Subtle as a fucking brick. I know ITV and the Guardian sacked him, yet the knee-jerk reaction over his comments about Desailly seems to excuse him in some ways, to say that it was a one-off and he was just being careless.
Careless is right. Ignorant, stupid, boorish and racist are all right, too. He called one of the most decorated players in the game, a player who has won the World Cup, the European Cup and the European Championships, ‘a thick, fat, lazy nigger’. It shouldn’t happen. No excuses. Particularly not the bullshit about him not realising his microphone was switched on. What difference does that make? If the microphone is switched off, does that mean he didn’t say it? Or didn’t think it?
The flawed logic of some of the arguments that the Big Ron apologists spouted astonished me in their naivety. I’m just surprised so many people were surprised that he said it. Then, to make matters a lot worse, he came out and said that all these people in the game had rung him up to sympathise. And so what are we supposed to think about how those conversations went, because if Ron’s boasting about it, we have to assume they weren’t ringing him up to tell him what a dreadful thing he had done. I can imagine it would go something like this: ‘We’ve all said it, we’ve all done it. Just you got caught, Big Ron, you daft sod. You’ll be all right in a couple of months, mate. Just keep your head down, pal. It’ll all blow over. You’ll be back in no time.’ Do you think one of those managers would have rung him up and said: ‘You fucking twat, Ron, you were bang out of order.’
They fucking should have done. Otherwise, that kind of behind-closed-doors racism is only going to be flushed out of football when the old school of management is out of the game. When they die off. Because so many of them come from that old school. And no one bats an eyelid that, according to Big Ron, the glitterati of football management