No Win Race

A profound account of the complexities and prejudices implicit growing up as a black individual in Britain, told uniquely through the prism of sport. In the 1980s black sportsmen were frequently greeted with bananas and boos from English crowds. Today, sports stars such as Anthony Joshua and Sir Mo Farah are among the most famous and revered personalities in the UK. While athletes of colour rarely face overt racism nowadays, one has only to look at the lack of black faces in the boardroom and listen to the stereotypical media portrayals to know that racism continues to lurk menacingly in the shadows of sport. The same can be said of English society. Things are better. But we remain a society divided by and in denial of racism. Covering the period between the Brixton Riots (1981) and Brexit (2016), No Win Race tackles race and racism in modern England through the prism of sport. Black athletes occupy a rare place in our society. They are symbols of racial progress. To those without any connection to the black community, they are the most visible examples of Black-Englishness available. But sport also reflects, reinforces and challenges the racial disparities common in our society, often in front of our eyes, often without us being aware of it. On the surface sport provides positive images of black people, but does it also reveal society's deep-rooted rejection of Black-Englishness? No Win Race attempts to answer this question. Brexit explicitly revealed England's fear of immigration. It also implicitly exposed England's enduring discomfort with people of colour. This fervent and at times provocative account addresses these issues through sport while observing how the black athlete personifies the conflicts related to being caught between two cultures, blackness and Englishness.