ABSTRACT
If anything, the New York Tribune underestimated the scale of the conflict that broke out on the night of 4 July 1910. Racist mobs attacked black communities across fifty US cities. An estimated twenty-three black men and two white men were left dead and hundreds more injured. What could provoke such an outpouring of fury? Two men fighting in a ring,
something that had been taking place for centuries. Only this time, a black man had defeated a white man to become the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. His name was Jack Johnson and his victory had dealt a knock-out blow to myths of white athletic supremacy. The development of modern sport was defined by a belief in the superiority of
the white ‘race’. Sport, believed the Yorkshire Post, the organ of the northern English industrial bourgeoisie, had ‘done so much to make the Anglo-Saxon race the best soldiers, sailors and colonists in the world’. Across the Atlantic, Harvard football coach, future US governor-general of the Philippines and subsequent ambassador to Japan, W. Cameron Forbes, declared that ‘football is the expression of the strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race.’2 The belief that specific ‘races’ of people are inherently inferior to others was rooted in the development of slavery and colonialism from the seventeenth century. Yet the concept of race is itself a scientific nonsense. As the Human
Genome Project confirmed, regardless of cosmetic differences of skin tone, there are no consistent patterns of genetic similarity that can distinguish one ‘race’ from another and no genetic basis for ethnic divisions. But if race is a scientifically worthless category, it is an intensely powerful social concept. And there are few places where it is more culturally significant than in sport. The modern concept of race did not exist before the emergence of capitalism.
Thus although slavery existed in classical civilisation, racism did not. Although there was undoubtedly antipathy between nations and peoples, this was not based on skin colour or physical characteristics. Indeed, the slave-owning society of ancient Egypt was at one point ruled by a dynasty of Nubian pharaohs and the Roman Empire governed by a North African emperor, Septimius Severus. Prejudice was directed against those who were believed to have allowed themselves to be captured as slaves, and were thus perceived to be weak and inferior. Indeed, slaves in classical times generally shared the skin colour of their slaveowners. But the growth of the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – in
which British ships took slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean, and returned to Britain with cash crops such as cotton or sugar – meant that the skin colour of African slaves became a justification for enslaving them.3 For the slave traders and owners, to have a black skin was to be inferior to those with a white skin, and a torrent of pseudo-scientific, anthropological and biblical scholarship poured forth in order to justify the enslavement of Africans. Yet, as Frederick Douglass, the most important black abolitionist of the nineteenth century, wrote: ‘we are then a persecuted people, not because we are colored, but simply because that color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude’.4 A similar point could also be made about the attitudes of the rulers of the British Empire. The conquest of India, Africa and the Far East was justified by imperialist spokesmen on the grounds that people with a darker skin colour were inherently inferior to the pale-skinned inhabitants of Britain. In Rudyard Kipling’s words, they were ‘the white man’s burden’. The ideology of white supremacy arose directly from the need to defend slavery and colonialism.5
