Having sat through Derek’s lecture on racism last week I am able to reflect on previous experiences regarding race. In this blog post I am going to write about my one true passion – cricket – cricket is a colonial sport and has racial divisions deeply embedded in the politics of the sport. All throughout history there’s plenty of examples of racial divide in the sport. An example that sticks in my mind and perhaps made more inroads into the international media than other cricket news is Tony Greig’s famous ‘grovelling’ comment made on the eve of the fiercely contested Test Match series between England and West Indies in the summer of 1976. Now, for the non-cricket intellects amongst you (99% of you I’m sure) I’ll provide a brief summary of the events that took place and are now etched in cricket and socio-political history. Greig, then England captain, born in South Africa and the posterboy of privileged apartheid white South Africa. If you were casting a movie and needed a typical white South African, let’s say Master Greig would be a decent shout. Anyway, to fulfil my promise of brevity, Greig had promised to make the visiting West Indies ‘grovel’. Now, this is rash. More than rash, it is devoid of any historic awareness that he had just used a word associated with slavery and black oppression as a taunt against a team that descended from slaves and the hard labourers of the colonial Caribbean. To relate this to Tuesday’s lecture, how far have we really come? Do we live in a society where we aren’t judged immediately by the colour of skin we have? Greig’s slur may have just been a slip of word-choice, even if it was, I would suggest that this slip is a result of a deep ingrained cultural racism that is ingrained in British society. I know I am guilty of it too. It’s entrenched in society.
To look at a recent example we can travel to Greig’s homeland, post-apartheid South Africa (SA). 9% of the population are White/European. 76% are Black African. When SA adopted democracy, a lot was done for political equality. By historical standards, SA politics is now fairly representative of the country’s demographic. However very little was done for economic equality and this has not developed as quickly or steadily as much of the Western World may have predicted. The same can be said in the parallel of sporting equality.
This is something that I myself am still not entirely sure about. Should a quota system be ‘interfering’ with elite sport? Should politics and sport mix? No, they shouldn’t but they bloody well do. Look at both of the recent World Cup venues. Russia and Qatar…make your own mind up. In provincial level cricket in SA, 7 of the 11 players HAVE to be non-white. Non-negotiable. At first-class level and internationals, the number of non-whites is to be 6. Should politics really have to be dictating the racial makeup of a sporting side in 2018. Remember, the apartheid era as we know was said to have been firmly put to bed in the early 90s. In my opinion, equal opportunities should be filtered through the system at a young age rather than get to the stage of elite sport and have to create an artificial racial divide. 21st century SA is indeed very different to 21st century Britain, I’m acutely aware of that having played with South African cricketers every summer for the best part of a decade. However, this case study is still very relevant as it highlights the job we as future educators have to nip structural and constitutional racism at the ‘bud’.
