ABSTRACT
There is a general argument within sociology that since the second world war – when the full horrors of raciological thinking reached their climax with the Holocaust – the discourse of racism has shifted from a crude biological racism, based on the mistaken belief in biologically discrete ‘races’ each having their own innate characteristics, towards a cultural racism, based on notions of absolute cultural difference between ethnic groups (see Barker 1981; Gilroy 1987). Cultural racism posits that although different ethnic groups or ‘races’ may not exist in a hierarchical biological relationship, they are nevertheless culturally distinct, each group having their own incompatible lifestyles, customs and ways of seeing the world. So distinct in fact, that any attempt to ‘mix cultures’ is doomed to failure, ‘inevitably’ leading to ‘race riots’ and ‘rivers of blood’ flowing through the streets.1 Thus signifiers such as language, dress, musical preferences, sporting identifications and religion become key cultural markers of distinguishing ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ groups (Bauman 1990). Within Britain, this ‘new’ racism claimed that it was not against Asians or blacks per se entering into mainstream society, but only against those migrants unwilling to disown any referents to a cultural heritage not defined as British. This British heritage tended, of course, to be defined in very narrow and limited ways which actually spoke more to an imagined sense of white middle-class Englishness than it did to the contemporary realities of a multi-cultural, racial and urban Britain. Crucially, as we discuss in more detail below and throughout this volume, sport has been, and continues to be, used to articulate these tensions over the liminal spaces between ‘race’ and nation. It is important however not to overstate this transition to a new more subtle
form of coded racism based on cultural rather than crude biological difference. In reality, the two forms can co-exist and often inter-penetrate. Further, in the eyes of many racists the fact that someone may or may not have accepted the cultural norms, conditions and ascriptions of national inclusion demanded by the political right is irrelevant. The murderers of Rolan Adams, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence (to name but three examples during the 1990s from South London alone) did not stop to ask whether their victims defined
themselves as ‘British’ before attacking them. Skin colour and the logic of centuries-old European racism, shored up by bogus science, racist popular beliefs, and self-promoting political leaders, created the justification and climate for the murderers’ actions. Indeed, the belief that blackness and Britishness are mutually exclusive categories is still firmly embedded within the British psyche. As Enoch Powell put it, in a public speech in Eastbourne in 1968, ‘A West Indian or an Asian does not by being born in England become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is West Indian or an Asian still.’ Or in the words of his contemporary, ‘comedian’ Bernard Manning, speaking at a police function in the early 1990s when talking about blacks, whom he repeatedly referred to as niggers, ‘they think they are English just because they were born here. That’s like saying just because a dog is born in a stable, it must be a horse’ (both quoted in Malik 1996: 143-144). We argue in this chapter that sport is a particularly useful sociological site for
examining the changing context and content of contemporary British racisms, as it articulates the complex interplay of ‘race’, nation, culture and identity in very public and direct ways. In a sense, this is the greatest paradox about sport’s relationship to racism. It is an arena where certain forms of racism, particularly cultural racisms, have been most effectively challenged. Yet, at the very same time, it has provided a platform for racist sentiments to be most clearly expressed, revealing how not only British sport, but British society itself, is still a long way off from being truly equal to all. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate there is no single, unidimensional
relationship between ‘race’ and sport. By its very nature, sport is a complex protean cultural formation. It is too simplistic to argue that sport improves ‘race relations’, just as it is to say that sport can only reproduce racist ideologies. Sports racism, and its relationship to wider society, needs to be carefully studied in specific historical periods in particular social contexts, which is one of the reasons why informed sociological research is so important in challenging misplaced common-sense assumptions about ‘race’ and sport. Given its ability to both produce and counter contemporary racisms, sport needs to be analysed and understood more fully than has tended to be the case hitherto by many of those engaged in countering racism in British society. This book is an attempt, then, to provide the beginnings for such analysis.
