The former England cricketer Gary Ballance admitted in a statement last week that he had used a racial slur against his Yorkshire teammate Azeem Rafiq. Rafiq accused the club of institutional racism more than a year ago, but the chickens have only now come home to roost after revelations about the contents of an independent report on the matter.
This report concluded that Rafiq had been the victim of “racial harassment and bullying” at the club and that repeated use of the word P*** was made “in the spirit of friendly banter” (here my eyebrows, and probably yours, are raised so high that they have formed a horrible ridge round the back of my head). Now the club is haemorrhaging sponsors, everyone has said sorry, some people have resigned, nobody has been disciplined and it’s not over yet. The Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee had summoned Yorkshire’s chairman, Roger Hutton, and invited Rafiq to attend, but Hutton and two other board members stepped down on Friday. As far as I can see, this mess is happening not because of name-calling but rather because Yorkshire made such a spectacular hash of handling the original complaint.
I’m interested in the name-calling. Ballance’s statement says that he did not at the time “believe or understand” that his calling someone a P*** could cause hurt. “If I had believed it, then I would have stopped immediately,” Ballance said. “He was my best cricket mate and I cared deeply for him.” It also said, “Rafa said things to me that were not acceptable and I did the same with Rafa” — a wheedling little qualifier that suggests there exists an equivalent racial slur for white people, which there doesn’t. It brings to mind those disingenuous people who say, “I don’t get the fuss — it’s just an abbreviation”, which is like saying, “I don’t get the fuss — it’s just a really amazing body part.”
Still, I believe that Ballance believes what he says to be true, and here’s why. There’s a thing that happens when a person has one or two black or brown friends: the fact that the friendship exists means that the person can’t possibly, in their own mind, be racist. How could they be? They have a black or brown friend (or sometimes a black or brown partner, for that matter). End of debate. What would be the point of ever interrogating, or even occasionally re-evaluating, their own attitudes to race? There’s no need. The proof is right there, in the form of their friend or teammate or partner. Of course they’re not racist — the very idea!
Actually, some are. Everyone is a little bit racist or a little bit ignorant about something or someone, and having a friend or partner with a different skin colour doesn’t automatically alter any of that. It means the person is not a mad troglodyte racist who shouts at people in the street or blacks up for a laugh, so that’s good, but sometimes it doesn’t mean much else. They don’t feel racist towards their friend or partner, but you can’t assume that they therefore don’t feel racist towards anyone else in the entire great big world.
Advertisement
Except they do assume exactly that. They’re so pleased with the friend/partner that they exonerate themselves entirely. They remove themselves from the larger debate — an urgent and necessary debate that is taking place on a global scale. Everyone else may be re-examining their attitudes to race, but not them.
Often what is happening here is that the friend/spouse/colleague has become an honorary white person, so “accepted” (thanks!) that you can say anything at all in front of them. Call people P*** when you’re with your white mates? No problem — just carry right on. They’re a good sort: they’ll laugh just like us — just wait and see.
I’ve come across this myself, including in relation to the word P*** (my mother is Pakistani), where someone will use it and see my sour and furious face and say, “Oh, God, sorry — obviously I don’t mean you!”
But nobody is flattered by being made an honorary white person: the idea that they might be is in itself deeply weird, as though a kind of special gift were being graciously bestowed upon someone who has zero interest in receiving it. People just want to be seen as themselves, all shades of skin colour included. Nobody wants to feel they’re the liberal mascot, the living proof of someone’s alleged broad-mindedness, someone who could ideally be miniaturised and stuck in a blazer pocket like a pen, peeking out to say, “It’s OK! He knows brown people!”
For all that a certain section of society mocks the #MeToo movement, or thinks it has gone “too far”, we do all, I think, now understand that the argument “It was a friendly grope, and if she wasn’t enjoying it, she should have said” no longer washes (thank God). In the same way, sitting in a changing room — or anywhere else — while being racially abused by your colleagues is not something that anybody should be expected to “take” any more. Nor should it be something that other people are able to dismiss as “banter”. Is it happening to them? No. Do they know how it feels? No. So who are they to adjudicate on what does and doesn’t cause a person distress?
Advertisement
If someone not white tells you that someone else’s actions are racist, believe them. They know. Complacency is nobody’s friend.
