No Win Race. Derek A. Bardowell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      ‘It was only long years after,’ said C L R James, ‘that I understood the limitation on spirit, vision and self-respect which were imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion of success was to have succeeded in approaching that distant ideal –to attain it of course was impossible.’¹⁹

The West Indies cricket team had been the purest sporting experience I had witnessed. It was John Edgar Wideman on ‘race’,^* Serena Williams’ return to Indian Wells after being racially abused by its crowd early in her career, Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without a Pause’, the Newham 7. This uprising had been televised. It was legal. Attractive. Brutal. In living black and white. It fractured whiteness (opening the doors for India and Pakistan to follow) and made the rulers the subjects, providing an image of what it would be like if you were us and we were you. England had been colonised. We had been decolonised.

      I’m not sure I could ever support a team as much as that West Indies side. They meant more to me than Ali. They were activism, style, excellence and heritage. They amplified my parents’ childhood stories. They never minimised, despite criticism. They exposed the fragility of the Empire state of mind. They validated me, my past, my present. They represented a part of me, the heart of me, but not all of me. I was stillborn in England. Still more English than Jamaican. I needed to find the English me, the non-white-defined English me, the something that represented a side of me that my father could never be.

^* John Edgar Wideman is an American writer and professor, and the author of ten novels and five non-fiction books. Wideman was the recipient of the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1990 and an American Book Award in 1991.

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