Racism In Sport

The truth

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”

A Welsh rugby player has been banned for eight weeks for racist comments made towards an opponent.

The incident occurred on 4 January in a match between Cardiff club Llanrumney and Trefil of Blaenau Gwent.
Llanrumney centre Wayne dacruz claimed he was racially abused during the game by a Trefil player, which led to their players leaving the pitch in protest.
A Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) statement said: "There is no place for abuse of any kind in rugby union."

The mitigating factors "included evidence demonstrating that the behaviour had resulted following significant provocation of the player, evidence suggesting that the behaviour was out of character for the player and the fact that the player has a good disciplinary record over his 20-year playing career".
The Trefil player is able to return to action from Monday, 23 March.

Nicola Adams: I suffered racism in boxing.

“The racism was more when I was younger, in primary school, and it’s about kids not understanding. I used to struggle with being called black. I said, ‘No, look at me, I’m brown’.

“My mother’s side is quite mixed. She’s mixed race, my uncles and my auntie have white partners, my stepdad is white. I was always used to seeing white and black round the table. I never understood why people would be racist
@ 02 Greenwich, London

Will Claye: I’ve dealt with racism from when I was a child. Being called a n-----. Not getting opportunities that my white counterparts were given. Being reprimanded at school for things that I didn’t do. It’s always having that stigma on you. I can be a young Black man walking on the street and get harassed by the cops. If a white lady is walking, she goes to the other side of the street like I’m going to rob her.
There’s times when white men look at me, not even as a human being. I’ve always been a good athlete and so I’ve always been seen by white men like a horse. This is like horse racing, and we’re a great breed. That’s how they looked at us as slaves 400 years ago. That’s not right.
I have been arrested for being Black. I have had guns pulled out on me in Arizona for being Black and going to a gas station

It’s time to wake up and smell the bacon. No number of printed t-shirts, apologetic press releases or player suspensions is going to win us the fight against racism in football. It’s a fight we can’t win.

The facts are simple. Out of the 92 clubs in the Premiership and football league, only two have managers who are not white. Norwich’s Chris Hughton and Chris Powell of Charlton are the only exceptions to a statistic that ponders the question – in a football set up where around a quarter of our players are black, why is it that we don’t trust them to take on the most pressurized job of them all? The answer is that we live in an inherently racist society.

Henri Tajfel's greatest contribution to psychology was social identity theory. Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s).
Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.
We divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).
Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:

1. the differences between groups
2. the similarities of things in the same group.

This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.

Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its extreme forms, racism may result in genocide, such as occurred in Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians and Serbs.

We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we belong (the in-group) as being different from the others (the out-group), and members of the same group as being more similar than they are.
Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e. “them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.

Examples of In-groups and Out-groups

o Northern Ireland: Catholics – Protestants
o Rwanda: Hutus and Tutsis
o Yugoslavia: the Bosnians and Serbs
o Germany: Jews and the N***s
o Politics: Labor and the Conservatives
o Football: Liverpool and Man Utd
o Gender: Males and Females
o Social Class: Middle and Working Classes

Social Identity Theory Stages

Tajfel and Turner (1979) proposed that there are three mental processes involved in evaluating others as “us” or “them” (i.e. “in-group” and “out-group”. These take place

Racism in Athletics Khai's Story about racsim in professional athletics. He went to represent great Britain and experiences dramtatic events.