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

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Cricket represented the first time that I can remember feeling a true sense of pride in my Caribbean heritage. At home, my cultural reference points were more Jamaican than they were English. Outside of home, black and Caribbean culture and its history had been non-existent. Indeed, the only black person I would learn about through my whole school life would be athlete Jesse Owens, and that had only been in the context of Hitler and World War II. Until I discovered West Indies cricket, there had been a whole side of me that did not exist to my white peers and teachers. When the West Indies forced its way into public consciousness, I didn’t have to minimise as much. Didn’t have to apologise or hide as much. In these cricketers was hope; hope that I wouldn’t always be anxious about being trapped between blackness and Britishness.

Couldn’t win though. Couldn’t change this narrow perception of blackness. A perception that we were subjects. If we were not subjects then we were somehow extremists, enemies of the state. Couldn’t change the perception that we were all the same. I was no different to my father. No different to a Nigerian. We were possessions. Guests. Barbaric, devilish-looking, ugly. Couldn’t win by rebelling. Couldn’t win by being compliant. Couldn’t win for trying. Blackness had been a white problem, not my problem. I’d started to recognise this through cricket and the establishment’s illogical response to black players. The establishment’s inability to see blacks as equals, its inability to see blacks as truly English, its inability to acknowledge us on our own terms. Blackness could only be seen through their eyes, their history, their struggles. Our version, our history, our lens did not exist. It didn’t seem to exist to my PE coach and it didn’t exist to the establishment.