A Beacon for Bristol

Bristol's concert venue Colston Hall has been rebranded as the Beacon after a decades-long campaign to remove the name of the eighteenth century slave trader whose statue was toppled and thrown into the harbour there in June.

Bristol has of course a longstanding Afro-Caribbean community, and an equally long history of fighting slavery and racism, including the 1963 boycott of the local bus company which refused to employ black drivers, shamefully in connivance with the Transport and General Workers Union (whose first General Secretary, and future Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, founded the union while working in the city), and in 2016 elected its first black mayor, Labour's Marvin Rees, a descendant of slaves now running a city built on the slave trade.

In the early sixties, another descendant of slaves, the former Mississippi field hand McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, stood on the stage of Colston Hall in front of hundreds of young white blues fans - thousands of miles and a world away from his Delta youth of sharecropping on plantations and playing at juke joints and Saturday night fish fries - although, in an echo of current restrictions, a local by-law banning amplified music after ten o'clock meant that the power to the microphone broadcasting his electric slide guitar to an enraptured audience was cut off after fifteen minutes!

The Welsh Codebreakers

I've just watched The Rugby Codebreakers, a documentary shown on BBC Wales last night about the Welsh rugby union players who were forced, as the saying had it, to "go North" and become professional rugby league players in Lancashire and Yorkshire when the union game was, at least officially, still strictly amateur.

Stories about the social ostracism imposed on those who converted from union to league are legion, as are those about the subterfuge scouts and directors of the Northern clubs were compelled to resort to when heading into Welsh rugby union territory to obtain the signatures of star players from the working-class mining villages of the South Wales Valleys and dockland districts of Cardiff - a history outlined again last night, with much of the archive footage coming from the 1969 documentary The Game That Got Away - but I hadn't quite realised the extent of the racism amongst the Welsh union's selectors which meant that up until the mid-1980's the chance of a black Welsh rugby union player being picked for the national side was effectively nil, all but forcing them, as some of their black South African counterparts also did, to accept the generous financial inducements being offered them by the top rugby league clubs in the North.

Wigan's legendary Welsh wing Billy Boston

RIP Cyrille

The former footballer Cyrille Regis who has died suddenly at the age of 59 after a heart attack was one of the black players who broke through into the game at the top level in England in the late 70s and early 80's, overcoming appallingly racism which was then, sadly, often regarded by fans and managers alike as just harmless banter, to be brushed off as something "normal" and to be expected.

In this, although more vocal and, in the "terrace wars" between hooligan "firms", many of whom had links to the far right, which accompanied them, more violent, those chants and insults were of a piece with the society around the football grounds at which they were hurled at players such as Cyrille, with the streets, pubs and workplaces which black people returned to after matches (if indeed they had been brave enough to attend them in the first place) and with the TV comedies of the era, such as Till Death Do Us Part, with its oft-quoted bigot Alf Garnett, and the awful Love Thy Neighbour, about a white couple living next door to a black one.

In particular, they were of a piece with the West Midlands and Black Country, where, along with the late Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson, Cyrille was one of the so-called Three Degrees of black players signed by West Bromwich Albion and managed  for a time by Ron Atkinson, someone who has had his own issues with racism (albeit not, if what his former charges say is true, with his own black players): the immigrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent who had come to work in its foundries and car factories in the 50s and 60s had experienced a racist backlash from the start, epitomised by the notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech of 1968 in which the Tory MP for Wolverhampton South West Enoch Powell fulminated against their arrival, but the decline of those industries in the 70s and 80s led to white working-class frustrations which expressed themselves politically in the electoral rise of the street-fighting fascists of the National Front, which gained more than eight per cent of the vote at a 1977 by-election in Powell's birthplace of Stetchford.

Above all, though, Cyrille Regis should be remembered for his sublime footballing talent: here he is in his pomp playing for West Brom against Manchester City on a typically muddy Maine Road pitch in 1980.

Miss Simone

For the last few days I've been listening to BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, an abridgement of Alan Light's biography of singer and pianist Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone?

Nina Simone is notable not just for spanning multiple genres in her musical output - blues, jazz, gospel, soul, R&B and pop as well as the classical music she had been trained to perform as a child in North Carolina - but also for being a political figures whose songs Mississippi Goddam and The Backlash Blues (the latter penned by her friend the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes) exemplified the harder-edged, more militant tone the black civil rights movement took on in the sixties in the face of racist intransigence from the Southern states and the Federal government's sluggishness in enforcing freedoms legally won by African-American activists.

Simone acquired a reputation for being "difficult", a trait often ascribed to her having some sort of personality disorder, but given the racism she experienced throughout her life (she refused to play at her first public piano recital until her parents were moved forwards from the back of the concert hall where they had been placed and put onto the front row and later had a place at a music college denied to her on the grounds of her colour before becoming a cabaret act at the bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she adopted her stage name) it was surely either a case of her standing up for herself, or, if it did indeed stem from mental illness, was a reaction to those injustices.

Black and white

Last night, as part of a season on Black British history, BBC2 had a programme about a 1979 testimonial match between black and white football teams at West Bromwich Albion's Hawthorns ground, presented by lifelong fan of the club Adrian Chiles.

Like most people I suspect, I hadn't heard of this match before. Although it seems inconceivable now, the players involved all saw it as either uncontroversial or even progressive. In a period when racist chanting and violence on the terraces stopped many black fans from entering football grounds, the presence of a significant number of people from the local Afro-Caribbean community among the 7,000 crowd, many of them no doubt attracted by the chance to see some of their young, Black British footballing heroes play in front of them, was seen as something of a step forward,

The general tone of the programme was "look how far we've come", and rightly so given the archive footage of National Front paper sellers outside turnstiles, Stanley knives wielded as weapons and bananas thrown onto the pitch, but former player and now QPR director of football Les Ferdinand did pop up at the end to give a necessary reminder of the racist abuse black footballers still face online and the problems they have moving into management and coaching at the end of their playing careers.

The many Malcolms

I went to an open day at the local mosque yesterday afternoon,

There was a stall with various pamphlets about Islam, including one about Malcolm X which I picked up. It ends "So many people love and admire him, wanting to be like him, and aspiring to follow in his footsteps, yet they see what they want to see and ignore the rest. We must never forget it was Islam that made Malik El-Shabazz [the Muslim name he assumed in 1964] what he was."

The thought struck me that there not many people who so many claim as their own: black nationalists, Muslims, socialists. In large part, that's because Malcolm was all those things, albeit to varying degrees and at different times in his life.

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam, a sect led by Elijah Muhammad, while in prison in Massachusetts in 1948. The NoI opposed integration with what it called "white devils" and ultimately advocated the return of black Americans to Africa, a position which led it into contact with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.

Malcolm X was drawn to socialism not just because of the racism and exploitation he witnessed in America's black ghettoes from a young age, but also because he saw it as the system by which Cuba and the newly independent former colonies in Africa he visited were advancing themselves economically and socially.

1964 was a turning point in Malcolm's life: he split from the NoI, converted to orthodox Sunni Islam and made the Hajj to Mecca, where he prayed alongside white pilgrims. He also formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity which, while still black nationalist, advocated some sort of alliance with poor whites.

After Malcolm's assassination in 1965, while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in uptown Manhattan, the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis gave this eulogy at his funeral, which also forms the final scene of Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

The actor Warren Mitchell who died yesterday aged 89 was best known for playing the working-class racist Alf Garnett in the 1970's TV comedy Till Death Us Do Part.

Unlike out-and-out racist comedies of the 1970's like Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, it was Warren Mitchell and scriptwriter Johnny Speight's intention that viewers should laugh at, rather than with, the character they had created, but it didn't work out like that and Garnett became a hero to the bigots who took up his lines as their own. In an interview, Mitchell recounted how he, unlike West Ham-supporting Alf, a Spurs fan from an East London Jewish background, had once been embarrassed at a football match to become the subject of supportive chanting by racists on the terraces.

Garnett's views are challenged in the show, by his long-suffering wife and his left-wing "Scouse git" son-in-law (played by Labour-supporting actor Tony Booth), but they both tend to come off second best to him. A much better attempt to challenge racism by way of comedy in the 1970's was Rising Damp in which the reactionary views of boarding house landlord Rigsby are made to look ridiculous by a black and a white lodger, played by Don Warrington and Richard Beckinsale respectively, and the audience does end up laughing at his backward attitudes rather than having their prejudices reinforced.

Go Set A Watchman

I've just finished reading Go Set A Watchman, the newly-published novel by Harper Lee (the name comes from the Book of Isiah in the Old Testament).

Like most teenagers in the 80's, I studied Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird at secondary school. This book is written in a very different style and voice: Jean Louise "Scout" Finch is now a twenty-six year old woman rather than a ten year old girl and sees her father Atticus and the racism of the American South very differently when she returns to the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, from New York.

Go Set A Watchman reads like a sequel to the 1960 Pullitzer Prize-winning To Kill A Mockingbird but is actually an earlier first draft of it: it just shows, as other s have said, how important an editor can be, in this case advising Lee to expand the childhood flashbacks and tell the story through Scout's youthful eyes.

The Life of Riley

I've just been watching a DVD I got for Christmas, The Life of Riley about bluesman B.B. King.

Having read B.B.'s autobiography Blues All Around Me I knew most of the stuff about his early life and career but there are plenty of other gems in it, including interviews with fellow blues guitarists Buddy Guy and Peter Green paying tribute and acknowledging his influence on their sound.

The most moving bit though is right at the end where a tearful B.B. stands next to the Governor of Mississippi in the state legislature as 15th February is declared B.B. King Day. You can imagine what's going through his mind in a building that as a young man he would probably have been beaten up, if not worse, just for entering. B.B.'s isn't the only eye it brought a tear to.

Kick them out

If past experience is anything to go by, Serbia will get away with a small fine after England Under 21 players were racially abused and then attacked on the pitch.

Fine words about respect and tolerance will count for very little when it comes to taking action against serial offenders like Serbia. The money-driven and deeply corrupt international football authorities have demonstrated just how shallow their commitment to equality and tackling bigotry is by awarding this summer's European Championship to Poland and Ukraine, turning a blind eye to the massed ranks of sieg-heiling neo-Nazis on the terraces, and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar where it's illegal to be gay.

The answer is really very simple: to belong to FIFA, a country should be required to show that it allows everyone - men and women, black and white, gay and straight - to play and watch football without being discriminated against or intimidated. If they can't or won't, out they go. It would probably mean excluding large parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa but ultimately football either supports universal human rights and applies them consistently or it doesn't.

Dreyfus, de Dion and the Tour de France

I watched the final stage of the Tour de France yesterday afternoon.

I don't really follow cycling and haven't watched any of the other stages.  I watched mainly because it promised to be a bit of sports history, an Englishman winning the world's most famous cycling race for the first time.  Bradley Wiggins is also a Mod and indie fan who lives in the North West and trains in the hills of Lancashire and at Manchester velodrome.

Reading up on the history of the Tour de France, I found this article about how it began in 1903 as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, the imprisonment of a Jewish army officer for espionage that divided France and increased anti-semitism and nationalism on one side and radicalism and anti-clericalism on the other. The car manufacturer Jules-Albert de Dion, an anti-Dreyfusard, joined other industrialists outraged at the pro-Dreyfus stance of France's leading sports newspaper Le Vélo in setting up a rival publication, now L'Équipe, which sponsored the first race.

The final stage of the Tour goes through some rather pretty countryside. I've been to France but not Paris. If the aerial shots of the gardens at Versailles are anything to go by, they'd be top of my list of places to see if I'm ever there.

I went for a walk after the race had ended. Maybe it was my imagination but there seemed to be a lot of middle-aged men on bikes out on the roads...

Paul Simon, South Africa and cultural boycotts

The Sundance Festival in London is showing the film Under African Skies tonight to mark the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Paul Simon's album Graceland.

Graceland sparked opposition from the anti-apartheid movement when it was released because it included black South African musicians and was recorded in South Africa, thus breaking the cultural boycott against the racist regime. When Simon and some of the black South African musicians on the album played London's Albert Hall in 1987 to promote it, artists including Paul Weller and Billy Bragg were outside to picket the show.

Apparently Simon spoke to the singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte before travelling to South Africa to record the album. Belafonte shared Simon's enthusiasm that the world hear the music of black South Africa but advised him to seek clearance from the exiled leadership of the African National Congress before he went.

I don't think anyone would put Simon in the same category as acts like Elton John, Rod Stewart and Queen who played lucrative gigs at South Africa's Sun City entertainment complex in the 1980's but was he still wrong to record the album in the country?

It seems that Simon would still have fallen foul of the boycott and the ANC if he had recorded the album with black South African musicians outside South Africa. A couple of questions flow from this. Why should black South African musicians have been stopped from working with artists from other countries? And what gave the ANC the right to decide whether they could or not?

I supported the boycott against South Africa in the 1980's but never thought that it alone would bring down the apartheid regime. It was really a symbolic means of supporting the liberation movement - much wider than the ANC, and including the massive and at the time militant black South African labour movement - which would bring down a racist regime which was also seeking an end to its international movement. The boycott was also primarily aimed at - and should have been restricted to - the white only South African sports teams, orchestras etc. and places like Sun City which excluded black customers rather than those seeking to build links with black South Africans other than those approved by the ANC.

The misguided or malign attempt to equate Israel with apartheid South Africa has led recently to calls to stop the Israeli theatre group Habima performing at The Globe as part of celebrations to mark the four hundred and forty-eight annioversary of Shakespeare's birth. Those who advocate a boycott of Israel include well-meaning people who genuinely think it would help bring about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and an independent Palestinian state as well as anti-Semites who want to drive the Jews into the sea and wipe Israel off the map. But none of them I think would oppose a British musician recording with Palestinian musicians in Israel or touring with them here.

Suarez and the handshake that wasn't

In her novel about racism in the US Deep South of the 1930's To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has the lawyer Atticus Finch tell his daughter Scout, after her first day at school with the children of impoverished backwoods bigots, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

 

In Atticus Finch/Gregory Peck mode, I've been trying to put myself in the mind of the Liverpool fans who have supported their Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez after he was found guilty by the FA of racially abusing the Manchester United defender Patrice Evra and his refusal at Old Trafford on Saturday to shake Evra's hand before the match.

 

Things that, however irrelevant, one-sided or just plain wrong, might make the attitude of Liverpool fans understandable from their point of view and explain, if not justify, their wearing of Justice for Suarez T-shirts and subsequent booing of Evra could include:

 

• The FA/media/Government being biased against Liverpool Football Club and in favour of Manchester United (or even anti-Liverpool and pro-Manchester);
•  The reputation of Evra for being confontational and deliberately provoking opponents;
• Alex Ferguson and United fans using the dispute to score points against Liverpool, and in particular their manager Kenny Dalglish;
•  That Suarez not only had the right not to shake Evra's hand (even if he had said beforehand that he would) but that to do so would have been hypocritical;
•  That the word "Negro" can be used in Uruguay in a friendly context as the equivalent of "pal" to either white or black people.

 

The last point is to me the crux.  The other things can be argued over but it is impossible to maintain that the repeated use of the word "Negro" by Suarez to Evra (there is no dispute between the players or clubs that it was used and repeatedly)  took place in a friendly context rather than the heat of a Liverpool-Manchester United match and a confrontation between Suarez and Evra.

It is of course a common narrative on the far-right to turn the victims of racism into culprits. As well as exposing and challenging that poison, we also need to eradicate the poverty and lack of education that serve as its breeding grounds.

 

 

 

 

 

Football, racism and the law

The idea that football operates outside and above the law has received a boost in the past month.

Liverpool player Luis Suarez has been banned for eight matches for racially abusing Manchester United defender Patrice Evra. He has not however been charged with racial harassment, unlike England captain John Terry who is to stand trial for allegedly racially abusing QPR centre-half Anton Ferdinand, or indeed the Liverpool fan on the Kop - ironically wearing a Justice for Suarez T-shirt - arrested after a black Oldham player was subjected to racial abuse.

Over at the City of Manchester Stadium, Mario Balotelli is to be banned for four matches after he stamped on the head of Spurs midfielder Scott Parker in last weekend's Premier League match and Carlos Tevez has been fined six weeks wages for his one-man strike in Buenos Aires.

These actions - racial abuse, assault, refusal to carry out your job - would in any other workplace lead to dismissal and/or arrest. It seems though that in the parallel world of football it's OK to deal with them internally unless someone makes a complaint to the police.

Luis Suarez and the N word

We won't know for a couple of weeks if the Liverpool striker Luis Suarez intends to appeal against the decision by a FA tribunal to ban him for eight matches and fine him £40,000 after it found him guilty of racially abusing Manchester United fullback Patrice Evra during a match.  The facts though appear clear and are seemingly not in dispute.

Suarez called Evra "negrito", Spanish for "little black guy", at least ten times. He contends, apparently with some justification, that the term can be used in his native Uruguay as the equivalent of the English "pal" irrespective of whether the person being addressed is black or white.

"Negrito" is the diminutive of the Spanish word "negro" which simply means "black" and was used by socialists and liberals and black people fighting for their rights in Britain and the USA up until the 1960's when "black" became the preferred self-description .  "Negro" today is at best outdated and at worst offensive and I would only use it in a historical context, for example when referring to the Negro Leagues that existed before major league baseball was desegregated in the late 40's.

Liverpool has predictably defended Suarez to the hilt, adopting a "our player right or wrong" attitude.  One of the more distateful aspects of their PR campaign is the wearing of Justice for Suarez T-shirts by Liverpool players and the display of similar signs by fans in the stands which mirrors and demeans the legitimate campaign by relatives of those who died at Hillborough in 1989 to discover the extent to which police and stewarding failures contributed to the deaths of their loved ones.

I think Suarez knew exactly what he was doing when he baited Evra and the line of defence he would use if he was challenged about it.

Time to split from Sepp

The comments by FIFA President Sepp Blatter that footballers who are racially abused by opponents in "the heat of the game" should accept a handshake from them at the final whistle and forget about it were totally predictable given his track record on such questions.

English football has thankfully largely moved away from such attitudes as a result of campaigns against racism by players and fans and a decline in racism in wider society since the 1970's.  The same cannot be said of Italy, Spain and Russia where racist abuse is routinely directed at black players, something which FIFA unsurprisingly turns a blind eye to.

Rio Ferdinand in lambasting Blatter on Twitter made a good point: if it's acceptable for players to racially abuse opponents "in the heat of the game", why isn't it OK for fans to do so as well?

Given the massive corruption that runs through the internal politics of FIFA, an attempt to reform it from within seems doomed.  The best thing would be for England and other countries to withdraw from FIFA and set up a new international football federation with its own World Cup.

No borders

Home Secretary Theresa May continues to flounder over allegations that she ordered immigration officers to relax passport controls for both EU and non-EU nationals.  Labour has predictably jumped on the issue to claim that "Britain's borders aren't safe under the Tories".  What very few people question is the need for immigration and passport controls in the first place.

Immigration controls are usually presented as natural and having always existed.  Neither of these things is true  In Britain, immigration controls date from the Aliens Act 1905 which resulted from an anti-semitic campaign by the far-right British Brothers League to restrict Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire. 

It is true that if the entire population of the world decided to move to London tomorrow, it would cause problems in housing, transport etc.  But how likely is that if immigration controls were scrapped?  As it stands, the entire population of the rest of the European Union (somewhere between 400-500 million people) have the right to live in Britain, as did all Commonwealth citizens up to the 1962 Immigration Act and as have Irish people since Ireland gained its independence in 1922.  The actual numbers of immigrants has largely depended on the economic conditions in the countries they came from, the demand for labour in Britain and access to cheap long-distance transport.

The fact that the EU allows free movement of its (mainly white) citizens but restricts entry to Arab, African, Asian and Hispanic people outside it is clearly racist.  The fact that Britain is an island also probably has something to do with the obsession about controlling borders.  The Schengen Agreement means that citizens of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and other EU countries can travel between them without a passport. 

And let's not forget that the immigration laws are routinely used to intimidate and victimise migrant workers, as in this case of a cleaner and RMT member currently facing deportation.

Dale Farm: ten questions

1. do Basildon Council pursue all infringements of planning law as vigorously as ones involving Irish Travellers living in caravans on an old scrapyard they've bought?

2. do the police normally smash their way into properties bailiffs have a court order to repossess?

3. has Basildon Council made any provision for Travellers in the borough?

4. is Basildon Council planning to make any?

5. has anyone from Basildon Council indicated where Irish Travellers evicted from Dale Farm are expected to go?

6. has Basildon Council or the High Court taken into account the cultural needs of the Irish Travellers, a group supposedly protected by the Race Relations Act?

7. has Basildon Council plans to ensure Irish Traveller children attending schools in the borough continue to receive an education?

8. has Basildon Council or the High Court taken into account the health needs of elderly and sick people forced to take to the road in winter?

9. will the police react sympathetically to Travellers evicted from Dale Farm halting on parks, industrial estates etc?

10. have any of these people heard of the Porajmos?

The answer to all these questions I would suggest is No.

Out of Africa

I'd been looking forward to Origins of Us, the BBC2 series on evolution presented by Dr Alice Roberts which started last night.

A number of things struck me, not least the extent to which humans' relationship with the environment has shaped evolution.  It is now thought that climate change and a thinning out of the forests of East Africa led to our hominid ancestors standing upright in order to reach food on higher tree branches about two million years ago.  The closeness of human and chimpanzee DNA, with a common ancestor about five million years ago, makes us near relatives and also underlines how ridiculous it is to divide humanity into separate races based on differences in skin colour, language or culture.

As the fossil evidence becomes ever more extensive, I look forward with amusement to how religious creationists will try to convince the rest of us that we appeared as we are now six thousand years ago.

With liberty and justice for all?

The news that Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Italy in 2007, has been freed on appeal has been met with popular acclaim across the Atlantic.  This is unsurprising as the US media assumed from the start that the Italian justice system was so flawed and the Italian police so incompetent that a fair trial was impossible.

Even if it's true that Italy's justice system is flawed, it does not follow that the US one is superior. Those who think so might want to consider the case of Troy Davis, the 42 year old African-American man executed last month in Georgia for the 1989 shooting of an off-duty police officer, who was convicted on similarly shaky evidence and protested his innocence up to the door of the execution chamber.

That the US media assumes an eduicated, middle-class white woman is innocent and a poor Southern black man is guilty says a lot about the racism that still runs through much of American society.