Dear WSC
A couple of things about the Back, Crabbe and Solomos article on racism in WSC No 118 which I thought was good and said a few things which needed saying. Most of the academic stuff linking hooliganism and racism was actually about support for the national team in the 1980s and 90s. Multi-cultural hooligan groups have been around for a while as Back and co say, but isn’t it mysterious that only their white members turned up to watch England, especially away? They knew what the score was for these kind of events, and violent racism was indeed central to trouble involving England fans abroad for a long time. Secondly, implying that multi-racial hooligan groups are themselves non-racist raises difficult conceptual issues of course; but try telling the Asian community in Newham in the 1980s, for example, that they weren’t sometimes explicit targets of combined back and white hooliganism and racism at West Ham and you might get some puzzled looks. Thirdly, the article’s point about opposing banal racism is important, but it would help if people involved in the campaign sang from the same hymn sheet. What chance do we have of dealing with the old (white) men on the terrace who often equate racism with a critique of redheads, if Ian Wright at the AGARI launch himself describes racism as being like “picking on people with big ears” or “people who are bald”. Saying, well, Wright’s ‘just a footballer’ or ‘just a working class lad’ won’t due unless we’re willing to say the same about his white equivalents most of whom even now don’t take racism seriously enough for exactly these sorts of reasons. Had a prominent white player made the same comment who knows what kind of press he might have had.
John Williams, Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research, Leicester
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