A glimmer of hope

 When the Euro final was over the Long Suffering Husband looked at each other with dread.

“Oh no! Why those three boys? This is going to be awful.”

It would have been nice if we hadn’t noticed. It would be great if skin colour mattered at much as eye colour but we did notice and we were worried. My daughter hadn’t. That’s progress, I hope. She just saw three boys not score goals in a penalty shootout. When my generation, that has accepted casual racism as part of life, has gone, maybe things will improve. We grew up on comedy that encouraged us to laugh at the difference in skin colour, we played games where the white hats were the goodies and the black hats the baddies, we sang songs about 10 little people that were put to death one by one. It might take our generation a lifetime to realise that for a lot of people none of that was fun. 

We often have conversations with our friends who say something that makes us take a sharp intake of breath. Conversations where we aren’t sure what was meant. The other day we were talking to someone in the street about football and they suddenly said, “And all this racism stuff. If only they knew what it was like in Belarus.” He might not have said Belarus because I’d stopped listening properly (it was football). We were both a little cross with ourselves that we didn’t call him out on it. However, we’ve been conditioned to stay quiet. Not joining in with the National sport of racism can leave you feeling quite vulnerable.

We thought that the front pages of the newspapers would be full of horrible things. I won’t write them here but you can imagine what a headline would have been in the Eighties. However, social media quickly showed the mood of the whole country. Most of us weren’t angry. People didn’t feel as though they had been let down by three boys whose difference was only on the surface of their skin. The true racists (we will call them idiots for brevity) - the ones for whom it is a sport and a matter of personal identity went early. They sent their messages and monkey emojis directly to the players. The non racists (what I like to call normal people) and the accidental casual racists (who don’t think too well for themselves) responded quickly and flooded the timelines with messages of love and support. That was actually quite a beautiful thing. 

The idiots misread the mood of the room. They must have been so confused. Football has always been a safe haven for idiots. The passion and anger after a loss are usually easy tools for the idiots to use. The right wing press then couldn’t report the way they normally would and instead went with headlines that talked of pride.

There’s a glimmer of hope there. After all the ‘kick it out’ campaigns and taking the knee as a protest it looks like some people have finally got the message. Hopefully. The colour of someone’s skin shouldn’t mean that they are treated differently. You don’t have to live in Belarus and fear you are going to be tortured in a gulag to want to protest that you are less likely to get a job, or have the posh kids talk to you at school, or that you are more likely to be arrested when you are innocent, or refused a bank loan or sent horrible messages. 

There is a small glimmer of hope that things are getting better and for that I am very grateful. Let’s try to turn that glimmer into a situation where the light is fully on and there’s nowhere left for the idiots to hide.