by Akala
Linford did further complicate the picture and invite justifiable accusations of hypocrisy by later making adverts that overtly played on his Lunchbox; one for Kleenex featured a topless Linford with the slogan ‘I’ve got a small packet’. He also became the face of underwear campaigns, which again invited a certain criticism.
However, the issue here for me is not really about the personal decisions of an individual black athlete but rather how this story fits into the larger narratives around black athleticism. In one of his brilliant essays looking at black British athletes, Ben Carrington contrasts the rocky relationship between the British media and Linford Christie to the almost unconditional love offered to Frank Bruno by that very same press in the exact same period of history.1 Bruno and Linford are in many ways symbolic of the differing cultural attitudes, desires and understandings of blackness between Britain’s black population and the white mainstream. For most black people old enough to remember, Bruno has always been a problematic character and certainly not an icon or hero, often seen as an ignorant stereotype that makes ‘us’ look bad. This is of course totally unfair to Frank, as he should not have to be a representative of his race.
That said, while Mr Bruno seemed to mean no harm, his unapologetic royalism, Thatcherite politics and even his refusal to respect the cultural boycott of South Africa at the height of the apartheid struggle make him a more problematic proposition than the simple-Frank persona might suggest. Despite enormous pressure from anti-apartheid groups, Bruno fought the South African Gerrie Coetzee in 1986 and justified this with the Thatcherite politics of ‘every man for himself’ and ‘I gotta feed my family’, he even went as far as to say that his promoter Mickey Duff had told him that Coetzee was ‘anti-apartheid and that he has dozens of black friends’.
For all of these reasons, Bruno came to be seen by most black people I knew as white people’s black guy, despite his achievements in the ring. Growing up, I remember hearing uncles and community members regularly ‘diss’ Frank and most would cheer for the black American over him, unlike with Lennox Lewis or Nigel Benn, both of whom were more loved. For the most part, the deference, the solely individualistic concerns and the failure to see the way he was being used in Thatcherite Britain made Frank Bruno at best an ambiguous figure to black Britain, and at worst a very disliked one. Frank was obviously well aware of this and it eventually took its toll on him.
In 1995 Frank Bruno fought Oliver McCall for the WBC heavyweight championship of the world. I tuned in as always – boxing was very much part of that aforementioned sporting religion. The fight was titled ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, with copious use of the Union Jack on the flyers and posters and in the press. Bruno’s earlier fight with Lennox Lewis had been marketed as ‘The Battle of Britain’, so the nationalist, imperial themes were not new. After twelve hard-fought rounds Bruno won on points to become one of just nine Britons to enter the elite category of world heavyweight champion, seven of whom are black.
The post-fight interview contrasts very interestingly with Linford’s television breakdown. Sat at ringside, still sweating and with tears in his eyes, Frank Bruno repeatedly asserted to the interviewer that ‘I’m not an Uncle Tom, I’m not Uncle Tom’, perhaps seven or eight times across the interview, even though the questions he was asked bore no relevance to that issue at all.
Here we have two black athletes at the height of their careers breaking down on television for reasons entirely to do with the dynamics of racism, but with very little mainstream public analysis in the aftermath. In the pre-fight hype, McCall had indeed called Bruno an Uncle Tom, as had Lennox Lewis in the run up to their fight. Bruno had claimed repeatedly to not see colour, a sentiment guaranteed to win applause from much of the white British public. He also claimed that racism was just a few ignorant people and he may well have sincerely believed that, but watching the big man cry at ringside and repeat over and over again that he was not a sell-out or an Uncle Tom you really get a sense that Frank, despite himself, really did understand that something was majorly amiss, that there was a part of his identity or credibility with his community that was missing. Something that he felt he needed to vindicate right then and there, at the most important moment of his career.
You see, black adults I knew growing up did not hate Frank Bruno, they actually loved him, perhaps felt a little sorry for him, and for that reason it pained them to see people that did not really respect Frank’s humanity claim to love him while sneering behind his back. Had Frank ever asserted himself, problematised the obvious racism that existed in Britain at that time or chosen to boycott fighting the South African in a basic recognition of black South African humanity, large portions of Frank’s ‘fans’ would certainly have turned on him. This we knew, so in a sense we wanted to protect Frank from exactly the kind of desperate outrage and cry for help that he displayed in that post-fight interview.
As Carrington points out, unlike Linford’s Lunchbox, Bruno’s ‘Uncle Tom’ breakdown went largely uncommented on by the mainstream media, perhaps because the British press at the time would not have had the political vocabulary and knowledge of history to even deal with the significance of the event. To deal with it would have meant many white journalists asking why their favourite son, a black heavyweight champion and presumably a multi-millionaire, still felt somewhat like a failure because he did not have the love of his own people. Frank was admitting with this breakdown that the money and the admiration of white Britain was not enough; that he knew in fact that it was not genuine and that he craved to be loved by black people in the way that other athletes and public figures had been. Tone deaf British journalists who have kept themselves functionally ignorant of Britain’s racial history simply could not grapple with all of this.
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Fast forward to 9 August 2012; I sat down to watch the men’s 200 metres final at the London Olympics. Usain Bolt had already won the 100 metres a few days earlier and it looked set to be another year of dominance for him and for Jamaica; like all British Jamaicans and sprint fans everywhere, I was very excited. Then something very strange happened. For who knows what reason, the BBC decided to play a weird eugenics film just before the final. The commentator who was sat next to a trio of black track legends, Colin Jackson, Michael Johnson and Denise Lewis, introduced the film in the following way:
As we build up to the 200 metres, and this is a subject that doesn’t get raised very often, because it just doesn’t, but the fact is that not a single white athlete has contested the men’s 100 metres final in the Olympics for thirty-two years. Eighty-two people have broken ten seconds for 100 metres and eighty-one of them have been black; the only one who is white is Christophe Lemaitre of France, who is running tonight in the 200 metres final. In fact, only four white men have ever gone under twenty seconds for 200 metres. So it brings the whole issue of nature or nurture into very sharp focus.
There are a number of obvious problems and lapses in basic logic within this statement. First, almost 40 per cent of the men on Earth are from India and China – not to mention the rest of the non-white but not-black world – yet whoever wrote this script seems entirely unconcerned with their lack of presence in Olympic sprint finals. A very clear white nationalist statement is being made, the issue is that white men are not winning, which should apparently be the norm, and to make matters worse it is black men defeating them – as if there is a permanent competition between black and white athletes. The viewer and society are being told that if black people are beating white people at anything there must be some kind of explanation. After that introduction, a short film played beginning with a discussion of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the eugenics movement and Nazi genocide. This was then linked to black athletic performance, as the voiceover informed us that all of the great sprinters could trace their ancestry to Africa, ‘that is to slaves’, then the voice asked: ‘Who was it that survived being put in shackles, packed into slave ships and taken across the ocean, who was it that survived the
life of forced labour on the cotton and sugar plantations, the fittest, only the fittest could survive.’
The film stopped and Colin Jackson was asked for his opinion. After Colin refuted the nonsense with a scientific study – which he was actually a part of – that found that both black and white athletes have the ‘fast twitch’ muscle that is apparently the ‘key’ to sprinting, the commentator’s response was: ‘But are we at the point now where if you are a very talented athlete at fourteen/fifteen/sixteen, and you are white, you are almost institutionally programmed to think that you won’t be able to compete at the highest level in the sprint?’
This is a very revealing question from a white public figure, because when black people assert that representation is important, that having role models you can relate to and who look like you is helpful, they are often accused of making excuses, playing the race card or wanting special treatment. Yet here, before the 200 metres final, was a public service broadcaster asserting that, actually, it does matter, and that seeing black people win, in a competition that no white people have ever been barred by law from entering, or in any way discriminated from participating in, could still discourage white teenagers from bothering to even try. Wow.
Michael Johnson who – sadly – also did a whole documentary investigating the ‘possible link’ between slavery and sprinting also refuted this suggestion, saying that culture, training and the national popularity of a given sport are all more important factors than some mystery gene, which is obvious enough even to a non-scientist.
The fact that the question is even asked, the fact that black excellence in a particular field needs ‘explaining’, tells its own story. I can’t recall any documentaries trying to discover an organisational gene left over from fascism that explains why Germany and Italy have consistently been Europe’s best performing football teams. Spain’s brief spell as the best team in the world, with a generation of players born in the years immediately after Franco’s death, would seem to confirm my fascism-meets-football thesis, right? Clearly this would be a ridiculous investigation – or who knows maybe I am on to something – but the question would never be asked because German, Italian and Spanish brilliance don’t really need explaining, or at least not in such negative ways.
When I was young, I vividly remember watching a BBC doc called Dreaming of Ajax which investigated why one Dutch club, Ajax Amsterdam, was able to produce better football players than the whole of England. It was a fantastic documentary that looked with great admiration at the obviously superior coaching systems of Ajax, which became so visible in their home-grown players’ performances. But it did not look for some mystery Dutch gene left over from some horrendous episode in European history. Nor did white dominance in tennis or golf – until Tiger and the Williams sisters, anyway – need to be explained by their ancestors having so much practice whipping people for so long, and ending up with strong shoulders and great technique as a result!
To get to the root of just how ridiculous the slave–sprint ‘correlation’ is, let’s look at some basic, common-sense facts. Before Usain Bolt’s victory in Beijing in 2008, Jamaica had produced not one single male 100-metre gold medallist, yet we are apparently being asked to believe some latent super-slave gene suddenly manifested itself 148 years after the abolition of slavery at the birth of one Usain St Leo Bolt. Brazil has roughly forty times as many black people as Jamaica and was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery, yet not a single Brazilian has won even so much as a bronze at the 100 metres. Brazil’s sole individual sprinting medal was a bronze in the 200 metres in 1988, won by Robson Da Silva. Frankie Fredricks from Namibia – so not a descendant of an Afro-American ‘slave’ – has won four Olympic silvers in sprinting, so that is four more than all 80 million plus black Brazilians put together.
What is one to do with such lack of common sense? The inability of whoever commissioned that film to accept that the hard work, sacrifice and years of vomit-inducing training it took eighty-one black men to run 100 metres in under ten seconds are hardly representative of the other hundreds of millions of black men is a little odd. To air such anti-intellectual nonsense right before one of the most watched sporting events in British television history is odder still. The idea that black athletes owe their achievements to the sideways gift of benevolent slave masters rather than to greater hard work, the cultural importance of sprinting in a given country, the quality of the coaching and better organisation and preparation is just fantastical. What’s more, it’s an even greater insult given that the real institutional legacies of slavery that can be so clearly seen in Jamaica and throughout the Americas are ignored or played down, while this nebulous ‘link’ between slavery and sprinting is given prime-time coverage.
Cuba’s phenomenal record of achievement in Olympic boxing, like Jamaica’s recent one in sprinting, or New Zealand’s in rugby union, or the USA’s in basketball, might have something to do with these same institutional and cultural factors. Yet, for whoever commissioned this film, the rather easily traceable nature of Jamaica’s athletic excellence – youth athletic meets fill the national stadium – just cannot be. It’s not possible that mere Jamaicans are like the Dutch of Ajax; better prepared, more dedicated, disciplined and more organised than their competitors. It’s not as if any of the other Caribbean islands, all of which also had plenty of slavery, have come close to replicating Jamaica’s success in this area; Usain Bolt has won 3 times as many 100 metre gold medals as all of the other islands combined. Lastly, the vast majority of enslaved Africans were not taken to the continental United States and there is good evidence that the slave regimes of the Caribbean were far harsher, so if the ‘survival of the fittest slave’ theory held true, the Caribbean nations would always be the leaders in this arena. Yet it is the United States that has traditionally dominated sprinting, by quite some distance.
Yet as the commentator frankly admitted, for racist people who have convinced themselves of innate white superiority, consciously or unconsciously, watching black men dominate the two supreme sporting tests of ‘masculine virility’ – the 100 metre final and heavyweight boxing – must feel quite disheartening. It’s notable that East African domination of long-distance running seems not to evoke similar insecurities, though it has also invoked its own plethora of ‘explanations’ and stereotypes.
My own relationship with sport is an interesting one; being of Jamaican heritage, sprinting was always popular among my community and friends. Despite being primarily interested in football as a teenager, I ended up competing in the London youth games in the 100-metre sprint, where I defeated the seven ‘fully black’ boys in the final and went on to compete in the all-England games. Of course, you could not help but notice how disproportionately represented black youngsters were at the games, but I was knocked out of my competition in the semi-final, and the only white boy in our entire competition came first. The truth is, we did find this weird, and on the way back on the coach people made jokes about ‘getting beat by a white boy’. My mum being white didn’t count in the conversation. It seems even we had internalised this idea about black people being naturally athletic rather than seeing what was obvious; that sports and entertainment are two of the only fields where black success has been clear and visible in post Second World War Britain, and so it’s hardly a surprise that young black men pine after the only two fields they see as open to them. When I go to schools here and ask young black boys what they want to be when they are older, footballer and rapper are the two most commonly repeated aspirations. I have asked this same question in schools in Zimbabwe, South Sudan and Ethiopia, and the answers were vastly different and much more varied.
Like the typical black yout from the ends, I played football at various levels; school, district and Sunday league. However, I went that little bit further than normal and eventually played for the youth team of West Ham United during the golden years when the club produced future England internationals Joe Cole, Michael Carrick, Rio Fer
dinand, Glen Johnson and Jermain Defoe.
Race was an ever-present theme in football, though it often went unacknowledged. Black players were expected to accept racial ‘banter’ without having a ‘chip on their shoulder’ about it. So when my coach asked us to go and get the ‘wog box’ – the stereo – I was the one who could not ‘take a joke’ and got irritated. Maybe my white coaches had watched Spike Lee’s legendary film Do The Right Thing and remembered Radio Raheem, but I doubt it very much. The sport vs. academia struggle was a strong current in my teenage years and it always contained racial undertones. I was good at football and played for West Ham schoolboys, but I also went to the Royal Institution of Mathematics’ masterclasses. My black Saturday school and my Uncle Offs were pushing me toward my first love, science. My uncle always told me I was smart enough to pursue a career in quantum physics from an age when I did not even know what quantum physics was. Years later when I took up football, he was secretly disappointed and told my mum that he feared football would ruin me. He, like many others in ‘the black community’, essentially viewed black sportsmen mostly as fools who did very little for their community and rarely if ever used their platforms to speak out about injustices once they personally had made it, with obvious notable exceptions. People like my Uncle Offs were far more impressed by black academics like Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James than they ever would be by a footballer.
When I started secondary school, my mum said in passing to Mr Muhammad (a famous black teacher at my secondary) that I could not wait to join the football team, and his response was to say, ‘I hope he is as keen on his studies.’ I now find myself saying the exact same thing to classes full of black boys who all want to be football players. I know Britain has spent quite some time convincing itself that black people in general and Caribbeans in particular are naturally great at sport and inimical to education, but all this shows is how little they actually know us. Quite aside from the tradition of community self-education that I was a beneficiary of, you could just venture into any Caribbean barber shop or takeaway – the only two businesses we run in the hood – and see who is on the wall, who it is that we choose to venerate. Is it drug dealers? Never. Is it athletes? Sometimes, but rarely. More often than not the faces on the wall will be Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Muhammad Ali and, in the case of my barber in Harlesden, a poster of black scientists and inventors.