Bob Marley
- 1981-05-31
A report about the emergence of Black footballers and their treatment in the game's culture.
Over recent years, Black footballers have robustly challenged racism in British society. Before games, the symbolic gesture of kneeling in anti-racist solidarity is now customary. They have challenged online abuse through social media, proactively speaking about and initiating boycotts of social media sites. Players like Raheem Sterling now continuously and vociferously challenge racism in the media.
But earlier Black players faced racism in breaking through to the game's elite level. In this edition of the multicultural weekly series Skin, the legacy and experience of a generation of Black men are chronicled.
Skin provides an overview of the shifting demography of inner-city schools and the conditions that gave rise to the emergence of young black professional footballers. The episode documents the 'white flight' in London in the 1960s, tracing how this coincided with the growth of the Black community's involvement with the football system. This phenomenon intersected with the infiltration of the terraces by the far-right and the normalisation of racist behaviour, reflecting the high levels of racist beliefs and the extent to which racist political discourse had emerged from the British mainstream.