I have got a friend called Bernie. Like me, he is a supporter of West Bromwich Albion. He runs gyms in prisons; he can look after himself. He is black, and remembers that our club was something of a pioneer in the British game in the 70s, with three magnificent black players: Brendon Batson, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis.
Like Raheem Sterling and other England players in Montenegro this week, Batson, Cunningham and Regis endured racist abuse. Back then, fans made monkey noises, used unspeakable words, threw bananas and other associated horrors. Bernie was in the crowd in those days. The players were outnumbered 10 or 20 to one on the pitch, but for black fans such as Bernie, it was thousands to one. “That must have been awful,” I said to him.
“No, actually I preferred it.”
“What?”
“Because, back then, you knew who the racists were, by what they were shouting or throwing. Now people don’t do that. But I look around and know there are some people thinking the same things. I just don’t know which ones they are.”
As John Barnes and others have said this week, racism in football is about a lot more than language. Shamefully, there is still racist behaviour at our football grounds. When it is identified, it makes national news. Yet, as Barnes says, what is less spoken about is that while at least a quarter of professional footballers are black, there is barely a handful of black managers, and even fewer black football executives.
Regis had a view on why this is. A year before he died, still angry to his boots, he told me: “The truth is that white men – and, to be honest, some black men – don’t like being bossed around by black men. It’s OK for players to be black, because, at the end of the day, they’re shop-floor workers, but the management seems to have to be white.”
Plainly, outside football, the numbers are just as stark. Black and minority ethnic (BAME) people are significantly underrepresented in parliament and in our boardrooms. Look, too, at the Windrush scandal. And look at the unconscious bias found against BAME people across Britain by this paper in December: 38% have been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the past five years, compared with 14% of white people. As many as 12% had racist language thrown at them in a month before the study, which rose to 43% in the previous five years.
Back in 1964, one Birmingham-based man got, I suspect, to the hideous nub of it. Go on iPlayer and find Colony, a brilliant documentary about West Indian immigrants. At 34 minutes in, you will see a black man, in devastating close-up, tell a white man: “You can be walking with me, talking with me, having a drink with me, or invite me to your house. But the fact still remains you have a little complex – that you’re better than me.”
Bernie gets the final word. He texted me to say that while there are obvious problems in Montenegro, we shouldn’t be so complacent that it doesn’t happen in this country. “We’re going backwards over here,” he wrote. I’ll buy Bernie a drink at West Brom tomorrow night. I’m dreading hearing all about it.
