`Race', Sport and British Society

Ben Carrington, Ian Mcdonald, Ian McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134578160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contrary to the popular belief that sport is an arena largely free from the corrosive effects of racism, this book argues that racism is evident throughout British sport. From playing fields and boardrooms of sports organisations, to the offices of sports policy makers and the media, this book breaks new ground in showing how discourses of 'race' and nation continue to pervade our sporting life.
Looking at a range of sports, including football, rugby league and cricket, this book covers key topics such as:
* British nationalism and nationalist ideology
* racial science and the images of Asian and black physicality
* sport, racism and the law
* black feminism and the issues of race, gender and sport
* the role of the media in perpetuating and challenging racial stereotypes.
Challenging the prevailing liberal view that sport is one area of society where 'good race-relations' are developed, this book offers a wealth of research material, and a strong theoretical perspective on contemporary British sport. It will therefore be of vital interest to sociologists, sports studies students, sport policy-makers and anyone with an interest in contemporary British sport.

1 Introduction
‘Race’, sport and British society

Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald

Introduction: ‘race’, sport and the changing discourses of racism

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.

Sport, nationalism and multiculturalism

Recent decades have witnessed a number of extraordinary achievements by Asian and black athletes. There have now been black captains of the men’s England football and Great Britain rugby league teams, black females have represented England at rugby union and football, Asian players have represented England in rugby league, and most sports now have large numbers of Asian and particularly black players involved in the game, at both the recreational and top-performance levels. Even Britain’s sporting bastions of white colonial power and privilege are being changed from within. In the summer of 1999, twenty-year-old, Hitchin-born Arvind Parmar became the first British Asian to compete at the All England Club’s annual tournament, Wimbledon, whilst Nasser Hussain became the first cricketer of South Asian descent to captain England. Arguably, such achievements have had a powerful ideological and symbolic effect in challenging common-sense racisms that have tried to argue that Asians and blacks do not quite fully belong to the nation (cf. Gilroy 1987: 62). Thus the far-right chant of the 1970s and 80s, that ‘there ain’t no black in the Union Jack’, loses its populist hold every time we see Denise Lewis or Naseem Hamed wrapped in the colours of the Union Flag. As Stuart Hall has observed, in discussing some of the shifts concerning the visibility of blacks within the British popular consciousness during the 1980s and 1990s:

Take sport in Britain. Nothing is closer to the heart of the average Englishman – as opposed to the fields where classically blacks have been outstanding, such as cricket or boxing – than the heartland of soccer. There isn’t an occasion when you can pick up a decent Sunday paper, with its photos of Saturday’s matches, and not see black faces.

(Hall 1998b: 43)

However, Hall is also sensitive to the fact that sport is a complex and inherently contradictory cultural arena that simultaneously serves to both challenge and confirm racial ideologies. Hall (1998b: 43) thus continues:

Are blacks in the boardrooms of the clubs? Of course not. Are they relatively powerless in the institutions which organize the game? Of course. The question is whether they have any currency, any visibility in the culture of sport where the nation’s myths and meanings are fabricated. The answer must be ‘yes’, and to say this is to note the significant degree to which the culture has turned in the past fifteen or so years.

(ibid.)

The reason why sport has often been used politically to articulate nationalist and racist concerns and why the changes Hall identifies have so troubled the far-right, is that sport is perhaps one of the clearest and most public means in demonstrating how Britain has become a multicultural nation. Multiculturalism though is an often misunderstood and problematic term.² In one sense the term is profoundly misleading when discussing ethnicity in general and national cultural identity in particular. It needs to be emphasized that all cultures – and particularly those associated with the arbitrary regional boundaries largely constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which we have come to call ‘nation states’ – are ‘multi-cultural’, if by that we mean a cultural space containing more than one cultural presence. And especially so those Western nations – as well as those subject to the subsequent colonial rule – whose economic and cultural development was predicated on imperialist expansion. As Edward Said has pointed out:

Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually consume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude. Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities, and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon those two imperial cities?

(Said 1994: 15)

There are no such things as ‘mono-cultures’ that exist as discrete homogeneous units, disconnected and uninfluenced by those around them: ‘all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’ (Said 1994: xxix). Cultures are by definition lived social processes that are porous, subject to constant change and are forever being remade, not fixed in some trans-historical moment which can be traced back to some homogeneous, original ‘folk’, no matter what the mono-culturalists may wish. As Richard Jenkins (1997: 50) reminds us, ‘diversity – with respect to ethnicity – is nothing new, it is altogether the ‘‘norm’’ ’.

Some commentators have argued that the narrow focus on identities and cultural difference, found in some more uncritical versions of multiculturalism, has actually served to weaken anti-racist struggles. This is because attention moves away from the social conditions that allow for and constitute the parameters of racial oppression, to the cultural arena that ignores power differentials between groups and which instead understands cultural difference as simply a matter of individual, or group, lifestyle choice (see Sivanandan 1990). Indeed the ‘celebration of difference’ sometimes has worrying parallels with the notions of absolute racial difference – whether cultural or biological – found in nineteenth century racial science and contemporary cultural racism.

It is in such a changing context that questions of cultural identity have assumed heightened political significance, in the process giving public cultural practices such as sport an increasingly significant symbolic importance too. The inclusion of Asian and black communities into the lived cultures of contemporary Britain, including Britain’s sporting cultures, has decidedly re-shaped questions of local, regional and national identity for all Britons. We would argue, therefore, that no account of the changing nature of national and racial identities in Britain today can do so without acknowledging the central importance of sport to these processes.

White Men Can’t Jump? Sport science and the preservation of the myth of ‘race’

Whether new or old, cultural or biological, what such racisms have in common is their dependency on, and ultimate reduction to, a belief in the biological separation of the human population into visible and discrete groups; that is ‘race’. With the widespread belief that it is an open, autonomous and meritocratic arena, sport is influential in informing people’s perceptions about the naturalness and obviousness of racial difference. As Hoberman notes: ‘The world of sport has thus become an image factory that disseminates and even intensifies our racial preoccupations’ (1997: xxii).

Despite more than a half a century of work by anthropologists, biologists and geneticists discrediting the fundamental organizing principle upon which racism exists, namely ‘race’, the unsubstantiated constant recourse to this flawed concept by many scientists and the lay public remains deeply embedded, and is an indication of how entrenched racism has become in scientific and popular discourses.³ The belief in the idea of ‘race’ was used as justification for the exploitation and transportation of up to fifteen million black Africans during slavery and for the domination and colonization by Western powers of millions of peoples throughout Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and South America (Williams, 1964; Walvin 1996). It also supplied the logic for the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of those – unmarried working-class women, homosexuals, Jews, blacks, gypsies, those with physical or mental handicaps, the criminal – deemed to be ‘socially degenerate’ and therefore a threat to the moral and physical health of the nation, in America, Canada and Europe, especially parts of Scandinavia, as part of the eugenics movement during the beginning of the twentieth century which reached its zenith with the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.⁴ However, although the horrors of the Third Reich’s ‘Final Solution’ discredited any public declaration of white racial superiority, Malik argues that ‘the assumptions of racial thinking – in particular the idea that humanity can be divided into discrete groups and that these divisions have a social consequence – went unchallenged’ (1996: 103–104). Malik continues, ‘[t]hough the political use of racial science was discredited, its conceptual framework was never destroyed. The discourse of race was reformulated, but the concept never disappeared’ (1996: 104). Thus, despite the work of the world’s leading geneticists, the stubborn persistence in the belief in ‘race’ appears as widespread and popular as ever. As Steven Rose points out:

Modern population genetics makes the concept ‘race’ in the human context biologically meaningless, although still socially explosive. The definition of race is essentially a social one, as in reference to Blacks or Jews. While there are differences in gene frequencies (that is, differences in the prop...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: ‘Race’, Sport and British Society
• Part I: Research Into Current Levels and Forms of Sports Racism: Some Empirical Explorations
• Part II: Public Controversies Over ‘Race’ and Sport: Science, Media and the Law
• Part III: Challenging Discourses/Contesting Identities