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Twenty-two years ago, I embarked on a master’s degree that changed my life. In the first week, I found out that there was a conference about football and human rights. Football. And human rights. Had someone read my mind?? Growing up in rural Scotland as a Black West African Scottish lassie, I had a love fear relationship with football because of the racism. I could feel the ire and disdain rolling off football fans towards me as I walked through the streets of the only place I really knew as home. They hated the colour of my skin, but the footballers on their teams scoring goals with bodies draped in the same skin as mine were their champions. And the more of those footballers there were in Scotland, the less the sickening ire and disdain rolled off onto me when those football fans saw me. More black footballers meant less racism towards me.
I set out to prove it in my dissertation and 22 years later I am going to publish what I found and what I wrote. I don’t want to change the words because it took a village to help me write it up and it’s a monument to how football and football fans understood racism at that point in time in the summer of 2004.
I’ve since started writing about the role of ‘race’ in surfing, born out of a decades-longing burning to visit Polynesia and trying to be as ethical as possible about it. My idea was if I could unmute some of its muted stories, it would have been worth the trip for its residents, many of whom would like us to stay away due to over tourism.
There is a racialised control of sport, the focus and endpoint of which is always to profit and serve the ’White’ industrial complex. But how do they do it? How did they do it? These two focusses on football and surfing form the start of the series “Behind the Game” which seeks to understand how football became a ‘Black’ man’s sport, how ‘White’ surfer dudes became the face of surfing when Europeans were afraid of water for centuries, and why there is such a skewed focus on ‘race’ in sports.
Dr HAFEAT Abbam
