The challenge of confronting racism in sport today
The headline of Bradley Smith’s piece dated 12 November 2021 read, “Olympic gold medallist Suni Lee details account of racist attack against her and her friends”
To Suni Lee, her family and friends, the reality of a racist attack on her must have sent shovers enough for all to be scared.
Where it was once thought that racist attacks were reserved for black people, the Asians are now coming to the realisation that despite their ‘colour’ being considered in the realm of race, lighter than that of their black counterparts, there are places in today’s world where people are only prepared to accept the Hitlerite thesis, decades after this death.
Just as many sought to convince themselves that racism was a thing of the past, in the global bastion of ‘democracy’ a president emerged marketing with much derision and venom, the right oof the whites to do as they please to others who do not look like them.
In the world of sport, trumpeted as the one aspect of social life that brings people together and where they put all their differences aside, racism has continued through history, giving the lie to all those sports leaders who preached otherwise.
Lee’s experience
Thanks to the US propaganda capabilities in the media, the world followed the trials and triumphs of Suni Lee.
Her bid to represent the US at the Olympics of 2021, postponed to 2021, was marketed as an Asian-American struggle for recognition through sport. At the time of her struggle to make the team, few in the media ever mentioned the potential for what eventually led to Smith’s headline last week.
When it so pleases the media, they look the other way just as much as those in authority in much of the so-called democratic world. Despite knowing and reporting of the rise in racist attacks on American-Asians, the leading media house sin the US and indeed, around the world, paraded the myth that somehow sport was exempt.
Last week’s report on what happened to Suni Lee, an Olympic Champion only a few weeks ago, reveals the soft under-belly of what the world holds aloft, that sport is the great unifier.
This Columnist suggests instead that sport is perhaps the world’s greatest mask that hides the despicable deceit that is sport marketing of athletes.
According to Smith, “Olympic gymnast gold medallist Suni Lee said she was pepper sprayed, and had racist insults hurled at her and her friends during a recent trip to Los Angeles.
Lee told PopSugar in an interview she was waiting for a ride with a group of girlfriends, all of them of Asian descent, when a car drove by and the occupants yelled racist slurs like ‘ching chong,’ and told Lee and her friends to “go back where you came from.” Lee then said one of the passengers in the car pepper sprayed her arm before the car left. The racist incident happened in October according to Lee.
The gymnast was clearly taken aback by the incident and is quoted as saying, “I didn’t do anything to them, and having the reputation, it’s so hard because I didn’t want to do anything that could get me in trouble. I just let it happen…I was so mad but there was nothing I could do or control because they skirted off.”
Nothing new
While Lee’s experiences comes against the backdrop of a significant increase in attacks on Asian-Americans, it should be noted that the hurling of racial slurs is quite commonplace in the US.
American history is replete with stories dating back to the ‘Jim Crow’ days when blacks were lynched for the fun of it. They were deemed and perhaps still are perceived as slaves who have no right thinking that being declared an American citizen gives them the same status as their white counterparts.
Some sociologists argue that there was a time when US educators thought and argued in favour of having blacks pushed into music and sport because that was all they were good for. This was consistent with the pervasive pseudo-scientific theories of blacks being in possession of lesser amounts of the ‘grey matter’ associated with intelligence in their brains.
The outstanding native American Olympic champion, Jim Thorpe, was a victim of racial discrimination.
The long list of those who were so humiliated during their careers and despite bringing fame and glory to the stars and stripes includes Jesse Owens and Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali).
There are some who would include Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters in their own listing.
Yvonne Goolagong and Kathy Freeman had to fight with all they possessed in terms of character, to fight discrimination in their native Australia.
Comedian and author, Dick Gregory, in his epic, “Soul On Ice’ critically analysed the Ali/Floyd Patterson as a battle royal between Ali, representing all that progressive blacks were fighting against and for as opposed to Patterson who was perceived as representative of the renowned ‘Uncle Tom’ concept.
In Europe, home to the several nations and peoples who caroused the seas, conquered and plundered nations whose populations they decimated because they were not of their ilk. They built empires on the backs of those they dared to invade in the name of ‘discovery’.
Today, athletes who are not of their colour have to live with racist grunts and have banana skins thrown onto the field of play where they ply their trade as professional athletes stiffing the pockets of the manifest owning economic elites.
In sport as in society
The 1 October 2021 edition of The Lancet, Volume 8, Issue 10, focused some attention on racism.
The international reputation of the Lancet in medical research and the advancement of modern medicine, should be enough to force us all to re-think what obtains on the field of sport and why. This especially in the case of rampant racism in sport.
The aforementioned Issue 10, states in part, “The booing of the England and Italian football teams when they took the knee before the final match of the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship and the online racist abuse of Black players subsequent to their performance in the match, just a week after the sentencing of a police officer in relation to the manslaughter of the former football player, Dalian Atkinson, raises the connections between racism in sport and racism in society.”
Sport is an integral aspect of societies everywhere. Sport is about people engagement in competition and, one would hope, in an atmosphere of mutual respect for one another as human beings occupying space on earth.
Racism came into sport and continues in sport because it is what obtains in society.
Nothing has changed!
It is the same conclusion of the Lancet, referenced here, that must have been engaged in by, and which led Colin Kapernick of the US American Football team, San Francisco 49ers, to courageously take a knee against what he saw happening all around his country, the USA.
The lone black driver n Formula #1 racing, Lewis Hamilton, is forever reminded of his Grenadian linkages as he has had to struggle to be competitive enough in the sport of the wealthy, to become world champion. His experience and understanding of global racism in sport and the conspicuous colour imbalance in his own sport, has led him to commit millions of pounds sterling to research, education and related programmes, to change the situation to enable people of colour to breakthrough in his sport.
Unfortunately, money often makes the world go wrong and so numerous athletes are easily comfortable with simply raking in millions whilst leaving the crass inequity in sport, ‘just the way it was…and will continue to be’, as far as they are concerned.
Confronting racism in sport
An increasing number of international sports federations have taken to publicly announcing their abhorrence for racism being drawn into sport. This all sounds very good but may well mean nothing, in the long run.
The untrammelled growth of professional sport has not only created a new generation of billionaires. It has also forced old billionaires to invade the field, perceived to be virgin territory just there for the taking.
Athletes, often directed by a supporting cast that is often more interested in what they can get out of the association than the well-being of the athletes in their charge, find themselves literally exploited just as much as their foreparents during slavery.
The mental health aspects of sport have never been taken seriously.
No one bothered when, playing their first matches at Wimbledon, the Williams sisters became hot talking topics, more because of the concern of the media that the beads in their hair could be dislodged while playing and so injure their opponents. That rubbish was sustained days on end with no one pointing out the tragic irony and racism that did not allow the media to consider that should the beads dislodge the first to be injured would be the very sisters wearing them.
The Lancet makes the point, “These incidents also highlight the need for a transcultural model to recognise the inter-related experiences of racist abuse from fans and mental health in sport, particularly for members of the Professional Footballers Association. Reducing taking the knee to a political gesture encapsulates an attitude that Black footballers and athletes should not challenge racism and racial abuse whether inside or outside the stadium or online.”
The challenge has begun and the Lancet is up to it. The document reads, “Unfortunately, current models of football and mental health in modern Britain do not address the connections between historical and discriminatory racialised processes, how cultural values emerge, and their impact on mental health in relation to a diverse playing workforce.”
Importantly, the Lancet arrives at the same conclusion that we have, in this C column. The document states, “Few studies have looked at the interconnections between, mental health, sport, society, and racism. There has instead been a focus on elite White athletes, as revealed in Rice and colleagues’ database analysis of 60 studies.
Studies of sport and mental health have not analysed how a culture of norms affects the psychological health of Black sporting communities.
To address racism and mental health in football and other sports is to move from a model that sees the individual as a subject of fear needing to be diagnosed to a structural analysis of the way sport enables forms of abuse that, while rarely regarded as a mental health concern, might have a profound impact on the wellbeing of Black sportspeople.”
New international sports order
Over the past several months this Columnist has been advocating that the time has come for the global sport community to establish a new international sports order. One that it founded on equity in the real sense and not just a convenient slang that allows those who own and control sport competitions to assume philosophical postures.
The new order must accept the stance articulated in the Lancet’s article, that insists that there must be new models of mental health that look “at the structural, cultural, and interpersonal factors rather than simply the psychological.”
Such new models of mental health must “unmask our fear of difference, and ultimately allow both the sporting and mental health worlds to transcend race.”
Aug 8, 2021; St. Paul, MN, USA; A fan holds up a sign for Olympic Gold Medallist Suni Lee during an event honouring the gymnast. Mandatory Credit: David Berding-USA TODAY SpoLee, 18, won a gold medal in the all-around event, a silver medal in the team competition and a bronze medal in the uneven bars in Tokyo.
