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This has been a truly remarkable season for Sunderland fans, reaching our highest Premier League points total for 25 years, which ended with the team qualifying for Europe. We exceeded expectations on all fronts, and recruitment over the past 12 months has been a very strong point. As fans, we have savoured many great victories and special moments.
As Sunderland fans, there has been very little for us to complain about, and really the only distasteful off-the-field issue has been the following: we have been rightly appalled and disgusted by some racist comments, mainly directed at Lutsharel Geertruida and Brian Brobbey. Ironically, both players were born in the Netherlands and can be seen as good Europeans, but Geertruida is of Curaçaoan origin and Brobbey is of Ghanaian descent.
There were also some racist comments directed at Habib Diarra when he missed a winning chance at Aston Villa after we came back to make it 3-3 in a very competitive game. Diarra was born in Senegal but moved to France at a young age and represented his adoptive country as a youth international.
Racism in any form is wrong on so many levels. Imagine how our players, who are elite athletes, feel when they have put in a great shift for the team but are then attacked because of the colour of their skin. That must be a truly horrible feeling, and I hope they turn to the rest of the team for support and encouragement. We have some great characters around the dressing room, and I am sure that Granit Xhaka, Simon Moore and Luke O’Nien will have had an awareness of what is going on, being able to understand racism to a certain level, while also apologising for the terrible negative signals given to our gifted players of proud African origin by a few twisted individuals.
I was born in Sunderland to parents of Norwegian origin and am very white, but in the last twenty years I have been on a personal journey through which I have come to understand a little about racism and its consequences. This was through focused anti-racism training while working in the USA.
Growing up in a Norwegian-speaking home in East Boldon meant that we were seen as different, but in quite a cool way, despite the suspected Viking vessel being unearthed in the late 19th century by the River Don in Boldon Colliery. We would celebrate Norwegian Independence Day each year on 17 May, and as my father was the Norwegian Consul in Sunderland, we would throw memorable parties for all the Nordic students in the town. Our yuletide gifts were opened on Christmas Eve, and we ate a lot of fish. But nobody ever told us that we were taking jobs away from locals; in fact, my dad provided employment for many people through Hedleys, a Sunderland law firm. My sisters and I never had any indication that we were not welcome.
It wasn’t until I took a job working for Novo Nordisk in Denmark – 1986-97 – that I personally experienced prejudice. I speak Danish and am tall with fair hair, but that did not matter to someone who called me a “crappy immigrant” after I misdialled a phone call to a rough area of Copenhagen, asking to speak with a friend in less-than-perfect Danish.
In 2006, I accepted a job working for a biotech company in Pennsylvania, where I attended an Episcopal church that provided outstanding anti-racism training. Despite progress such as electing Barack Obama as the first African American US President in 2008, and federal law changes making discrimination illegal in most contexts, America remains a country troubled by racism. I could write at length about this, but it can still be a challenge to function well as a person of colour in parts of America.
Harriet Tubman (c. 1822 – 1913) was a famous American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became a leading “conductor” on the Underground Railroad in Maryland and Pennsylvania. This was not a literal railroad, but a network of clandestine routes and collaborators that moved those escaping slavery to the North of the US, where they could work and live in relative liberty. Known as “Moses”, Tubman made around 19 trips to the South, rescuing more than 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, without losing a single person. If you want to learn more about this, check out the film Harriet on Amazon Prime.
Another Pennsylvania resident, Bayard Rustin, organised the 1963 March on Washington and advised Martin Luther King Jr., who was also active in Pennsylvania, on non-violence. I am asserting that many people made huge exertions to drive efforts to see the whole of humanity as equal, in line with the US Constitution, and this was a century after the US Civil War, which was driven in part by the North seeking to remove slavery in the South. So many people suffered for the more equal society we enjoy today.
So, there are two dominant aspects to racism in America: the history of the country, where a great deal of white prosperity was built on slavery and cities were segregated, and the present day, where many people of colour still struggle. To be honest, there is also an emergence of populist right-wing governments in many other countries such as Brazil, Turkey and Italy. Then, not least in our own UK, where the unpopularity of the current administration may well result in Reform and Nigel Farage being part of a future elected government. The common strand running through many of these movements is the search for people in society to blame for a range of negative issues faced by nations. Sadly, this has been quite common throughout human history, with Cromwell’s slaughter of the Irish, the Highland Clearances, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide representing just a few horrific examples.
Finding Roly – Sunderland’s First Black Footballer
Football does have a tribal element. We follow our team and do all we can with chants, jeers and other methods to unsettle the opposition. I do recall a lot of racist chanting and comments on football terraces in the 1970s and 1980s, and the emerging story of Roly Gregoire, our first Black player, illustrates how much racism there was in our country and region at that time. Heroic footballers such as Clyde Best MBE, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis also emerged during that period, helping to change attitudes, but I am sure there were many others who struggled as well.
There has been tremendous progress in addressing racism in both society and football, especially through the “Kick It Out” campaign. If all our fans answer the honest question of where Sunderland would be this season without our gifted and motivated players of colour, there is a place for true acceptance and admiration. There is no place for racism in any form at our beloved football club, and that message needs to be driven home by all supporters.
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