Beginning with its very title, Lilian Thuram’s White Thinking is a book that stops you in your tracks, never more so than when Thuram reprints and discusses an 1843 painting by the French artist Marcel Antoine Verdier called Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies.
It’s a shocking work, depicting a naked black slave, face down and staked to the ground, being whipped while his white owner looks on. The owner’s terrified infant daughter is comforted by her mother and a black maid, while a black child of similar age is left, in the dirt with a dog, to witness the horrors of the beating.
The painting was shown at an exhibition at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris in 2019, which Thuram co-curated. One of the organisers told him not to show it to children and this rather proved what he feels Verdier’s image articulates — that the reality of the brutality and subjugation inflicted on black people is not something white people wholly want to face. Thuram writes: “The child [in the painting] is not yet conditioned to the violence of the society in which they live. They want to get away; they’re a long way from accepting it. In other words, they’re not yet White; they’re becoming White.”
The purpose of his book is not to make white people feel guilty but to trigger in them “humility” and “courage” to help to change a world structure where they “continue to benefit from the systematic diminishing of non-White people.” He wants to “defend the only identity that counts: human identity”. It’s a profound book and if you’re looking for dressing-room gossip from the great France team that won the 1998 World Cup, or banalities about Monaco, Parma, Juventus and Barcelona (Thuram’s clubs) you should probably shop elsewhere.
Thuram has been campaigning against racism since his playing career, in which he won a record 142 France caps, and admires a generation of young activist English footballers, such as Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling, who use the platform their sport provides to make a difference on social issues. At one point in our 90-minute conversation via Zoom, Thuram states: “Nothing is more political than football,” which is ironic, I tell him, because Rashford and co are often told to “keep politics out of sport” by those who don’t like them speaking about certain causes.
Advertisement
This takes Thuram back to when he was told not to show children Verdier’s painting. “It’s the same in football,” he says. “A player goes out and expresses their feelings about world hunger or environmental problems and everyone claps and says that’s wonderful. But when you denounce racism, that becomes problematic.
“Those who denounce racism are typically those who suffer from it — and as the book says, ‘white thinking’ demands that those who suffer stay quiet and don’t question the system. It has been unsettling to some to hear all of these black voices [in football] speak up and demand change. People don’t want to be confronted by the violence of white identity.
“At this point, I need to give some clarification: it is not that there is a violence on the part of all individual white people, but a violence of white identity. People often feel attacked in their white identity when you raise these things but we need to be aware that these identities [of ‘white’ and ‘black’] are worn like masks and are constructed. So, with Marcus Rashford, a footballer who speaks out about problems within society, you have all of these voices raised against him, who say, ‘Listen to you, you are wealthy, you have all this privilege, you cannot talk about these things — go back in your box.’
“But I would encourage all players who want to, to speak out. Those who, historically, have spoken out — like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Colin Kaepernick — show that when you speak out you might suffer violence or imprisonment or losing your livelihood. But only speaking up is going to bring about change.”
England is ahead of France, he suggests, in terms of sports stars using their voice. It’s down to cultural legacy. “French colonialism had an assimilation policy of telling the colonised they were French. It is reflected in policies today. In Britain, it’s more acceptable for different identities to be recognised; in France only the ancient identity of France is recognised, a white identity. So, to speak up as a black French player, about your experience as a black player, is to almost be cut off from the national community,” he says.
Advertisement
“I congratulate Rashford, Sterling and other English players for standing up, because footballers are taught to be afraid of rocking the boat.”
The world needs more Gareth Southgates, he says: white authority figures who oppose racism and empower others to take a stand. He admires how Jordan Henderson, as Liverpool captain, has spoken against racism too. “When someone denounces racism that they suffered themselves, it can often be dismissed as subjective. It’s ‘because you’re black’. But when someone who is not a victim recognises the problems, it’s harder to dismiss. What white players need to do is leave the pitch [in the face of racist chanting or incidents]. That would send a powerful message – that racism is an issue for all of us. A position a lot of black intellectuals subscribe to is that racism is primarily an issue for white people, not those who suffer from it, in the same way that sexism is an issue for men — because it’s men who refuse equality for women. With race, white players standing up can go a long way to bringing about equality.”
He reflects that no one is born “black” or “white” and that he did not encounter discrimination until his family moved from Guadeloupe, in the French Caribbean, to the outskirts of Paris when he was nine. Racism “was present all the way through my [playing] career,” he says and notes the racist chanting he heard in stadiums in the 1990s is still heard today. “It is not a priority of sport, as a business, to bring an end to racism and as a participant you are told, ‘It is not for you to deal with as a player.’ ”
This seems particularly true when there is a backlash against footballers taking personal stances and they are told to “stick to” the official campaigns, like Uefa’s No To Racism or the Premier League’s No Room For Racism initiatives. “The campaigns are good as far as they go,” says Thuram. “But they are not enough. I would ask you to do a bit of journalistic work on how quickly Fifa and Uefa drop campaigns and just quietly let things go.”
Fifa disbanded its anti-racism taskforce in 2016, claiming its work was done, yet in September faced scrutiny when it allowed Hungary to play a World Cup qualifier against England before a full house in Budapest, despite a Uefa ban on home fans after incidents of racism and homophobia at Euro 2020. Sterling and Jude Bellingham were duly abused with monkey chants, and Thuram says: “It is clear. You have to stop matches when racist incidents occur. And then make a decision: what is more important, morality and human dignity? Or making money, the business? If there was a will to change then it would happen, but that will isn’t there. So change needs to come from players saying that enough is enough. And the message from the authorities is that the ‘game must go on’. What they really mean is that the business must go on.”
Advertisement
White Thinking: Behind the Mask of Racial Identity is out now, priced £18.99
