A conversation about race with John Barnes is profoundly discomfiting. This is how it should be. If the lot of people of colour is ever to improve, the former Liverpool and England winger argues, it requires all of us to think differently, to question our behaviour and to accept that prejudice, be it racism, sexism or homophobia, might just start at home.
Barnes has gathered up a lifetime’s thoughts and deliberations in a quasi-sociological tome entitled The Uncomfortable Truth About Racism. That it is published in Black History Month is to a degree co-incidence. His polemic was eight years in the writing. The Black History window gives it a topical edge, but ultimately what Barnes has to say has a relevance and urgency beyond genre.
Barnes attacks his subject like he did the Brazilian defence in the Maracana as a 20-year-old, scattering traditional beliefs. Football provides the initial context before he branches out into history, politics, philosophy and economics with flair and bite.
Barnes contends that the direction we are taking in the fight against racism, the solutions and the way we frame the problem is wrong.
“What we believe has to happen is to get an elite group of black people into positions of power and things will change. That has never worked. You have to look at the nuances around class and elitism.”
There are some big targets in the book, and not all white. Dr Tony Sewell, the chairman of the government commission on race and ethnic disparities, is shredded over a report that concluded institutional racism does not exist in this country. That Barnes sees racism in class terms is a radical departure.
“We have to work from the bottom up to see the average black person as equals. The same goes for the women and gay people. If we do that you will see many rising up the ladder themselves. But we are not doing that. We are looking to elevate an elite group of black people to give the illusion that progress is happening.”
What is really happening according to Barnes is not an appropriation of blackness but a denial of it.
“What we are doing is elevating them out of their state of being black,” he said. “We have to stop looking at what’s going on up above, stop saying that’s a representation of equality or what we can be.
“We have to change perceptions based on the experience of the average black person.”
In other words it’s great being John Barnes, or a pop star or an actor. But the life of a famous athlete or celebrity of colour is not representative of a black community still disadvantaged by racism. Barnes has no trust in the ability of the great institutions of state and the infrastructure that supports them, the courts, educators, the media, etc to bring about change. For him it is a personal endeavour of truth and reconciliation.
“We have to recondition the way we think. We have to first accept that this is a thing, that we have been conditioned to think in a certain way, then understand why it happened. Why it happened had nothing to do with black and white and everything to do with capitalism, economics, the system.”
Thus racism is not a natural phenomenon but learned and cemented via the social and political rubric of society. People of all backgrounds, creeds and faiths become conditioned by the prevailing orthodoxy. This is what we have to unpick.
According to Barnes we start by telling the truth, both at the individual level and institutionally, though the latter is a harder nut to crack. This, amongst other things, would require rethinking cornerstone historical figures. For example Winston Churchill, revered in Britain as a hero, the leader that saved the nation in World War II.
It is broadly accepted among academics that Churchill was indeed a white supremacist.
It is also the case that his campaigns against Kurds, Afghans and Iraqis as war secretary in the post First World War period when the great powers sought to impose order in the former Ottoman Empire, were hugely controversial if not inhumane.
For most Britons, Churchill is unassailable, his reputation as the greatest political figure of the age clad in concrete.
It is precisely this type of uncritical acceptance that must be challenged if we have any chance of erasing racism from our culture.
On a private level we must look inward to confront bias, conscious or otherwise. Barnes quotes Martin Luther King to illustrate how good people can be the biggest impediment to change.
In a letter written from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 King switched on the lights with the observation that “the shallow understanding of good people is more detrimental than the misunderstanding of bad people.”
Meaning, Barnes says “that we think Eastern Europeans, 12-year-old fans, Peter Beardsley, they are the problem because as long as we don’t throw bananas on the field, whistle at a woman, or beat up a gay person, we are not racist, sexist or homophobic.
“The reality is most of us are to a certain degree. So we must own it within ourselves first and then we can start to change.”
Think golfer Justin Thomas reprimanding himself with a homophobic slur after missing a putt. Thomas insisted he wasn’t homophobic and was deeply apologetic. It was a crash course in awareness for a bloke universally regarded as decent.
Barnes accepts that the world is improving, that overt racism and other prejudices are now punishable by law, but nirvana is not only some way off, it might never be realised if we wait for top down solutions.
He has huge sympathy for the white working classes struggling with the idea of white privilege when the system shuts them out just as profoundly as it excludes people of colour. This is why he advocates the uniting of all disenfranchised groups irrespective of race, gender or sexual orientation.
“We need allies. We all have to come together to support each other rather than being fragmented.”
The first step is to confront our own prejudices honestly, to wheedle out unconscious bias.
“You can’t blame 13-year-old racist fans. Blame the environment that made them think that way. Challenge that environment.
“Until we accept that we have been conditioned by the narrative of hundreds of years, nothing will change. It won’t happen if we leave it to the system and the law makers – only when we alter our individual perspectives. We have to do it ourselves.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3jiKyi4
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