Black and white?

For something that has done more for racial integration and harmony in the United Kingdom than probably anything else, professional football is currently making an unholy mess of its position on the matter isn’t it?

First, just a little bit of historical context to underline football’s contribution. I’ll give you a bit of a timeline of a few events that have all happened in and around England’s second city, Birmingham.

1964: Smethwick, West Midlands: General election, Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths wins his Parliamentary seat by using the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”.

1968: Birmingham, West Midlands: Enoch Powell makes his “Rivers of Blood” speech.

1976: Birmingham, West Midlands: Eric Clapton makes his “Enoch was right” declaration during a concert.

1978: West Bromwich, West Midlands: Black footballers Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendon Batson play together for West Bromwich Albion.

2014: West Bromwich, West Midlands: Celebration statue to be unveiled in the town centre featuring Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson.

Now, to go from “If you want a nigger for a neighbour” to building a statue in honour of three black men just two miles down the road in 50 years, I think you would have to call that progress wouldn’t you? Much of it can be laid at the door of football, a sport which showed that integration was possible, that in the timeless phrase of Mr Paul McCartney and Mr Steven Wonder, ebony and ivory could, indeed, live together in perfect harmony, with, or without, a piano keyboard to do it on.

Football has, however, if not lost its way entirely, has an urgent need to shove fresh batteries into its SatNav. The various controversies that have involved the likes of John Terry and Luis Suarez have been well rehearsed here and elsewhere, symptomatic of what seems a disturbing complacency about the problem. Indeed, there are real concerns that we have take our eye off the ball in recent times and have forgotten just how pernicious racism can be, no least in times of economic turmoil when the idea of scapegoating on the basis of difference is at its most seductive.

We have seen the simple, explicit message of “Kick Racism Out Of Football” supplanted by the “One Game One Community” line that looks to confront all forms of discrimination under one blanket header. It is doubtless a laudable idea but by that scattergun approach, it has effectively diluted the potency of the head on war waged by the single issue campaign in the past. To many, we now seem to have a watered down approach that effectively addresses nothing.

You have to wonder if it is time for a change of gear now, not least in the wake of last Sunday’s PFA awards dinner where comedian Reginald D Hunter scandalised the watching audience by use of the word nigger. Perhaps that and some of his other material was ill judged, but the reflex responses to a black man using that word has exposed all kinds of other issues. All that has been reported is the word itself, not the context, not how it was meant. It’s unlikely that he used it with malice, with a hateful heart the way that a fascist would. Equally, as an American comedian, he uses it in a markedly different way to how it would be used – and received – in the UK.

However, he used that word and those who sit in judgement have that one at the very top of the list of words you cannot use, no way, no how. Once upon a time, that list was needed, particularly in the bleak days of the ‘70s and ‘80s when bananas rained down and monkey chants were heard at all our games.

But while we might think of racists as terminally stupid, hate is an infinitely subtle emotion, one that goes undercover only to break out in all kinds of new sly ways, one that subverts lists. Our lists of words that we must not use are now redundant because that battle has largely been won. Or, more accurately lost, because if we are going to mount a reflex attack on a black comedian for his use of that word, we truly have lost the plot.

Racism wasn’t sent into retreat simply by prohibiting words. It was won by standing up to the real thugs, by demanding that things got better, that chanting ended, that abuse ended. And now it is more insidious, I can promise you that it will not be won by well meaning white people who tie themselves in knots by trying to be PC. None of us can use the N word, I can’t type it without flinching, but what good does that do now in the fight against racism? Sod all really.

The time has come for a militant refusal to take this crap any longer, for an insistence on the imposition of the Rooney Rule – and not just in football, but in the boardrooms of the country too – and for white people to surrender their positions in these well meaning bodies to those who are on the receiving end of discrimination, who know what it is and who know what it isn’t.

What we don’t need is the PFA intoning that they will not pay a black man for the day’s work he did for them. Didn’t Abe Lincoln make that illegal?