Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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My mum couldn’t watch. The ‘othering’ of blackness, the casual racism, the biased commentary – my mum felt every remark, every dig, every complaint. She knew that most commentators had little or no conception of where these players had come from. Or where she’d come from. If in Ali–Holmes I saw for the first time vulnerability in my father, in my mother’s response to the critics of the West Indies, I had seen where some of my politics had come from. A staunch and boundless love of black people. For the first time, I recognised that the fear I felt because of others’ fear was in fact real. Not an abstract conception I had been internalising, running away from, trying to explain, failing to explain. The switch. A switch. I thought less about what we as black people were doing wrong and more about what the mainstream media had been claiming we were doing wrong. Not us. But them.

As the West Indies’ dominance continued, the criticisms heightened. Not just Richards. Clive Lloyd – bespectacled, respected, more diplomat than cricketer – had been severely criticised for his tactics. The coverage of his captaincy often felt like he had betrayed his colonial masters; he had failed to follow in the footsteps of Sir Frank Worrell and others who never used such tactics. Lloyd had little or no respect for the former rulers. Didn’t care what they said, or how they portrayed him.