One week on...

One week has passed. One week for the fog to lift. One week for the disappointment to leach away. One week for the hurt to subside.

You’re talking about the football, right, Stu?

Yes. And yet, importantly, no.

One week ago eleven young English men – boys, really, some of them – strode out onto a hallowed pitch in our nation’s capital city, the most truly global city on the planet, and lined up together as a team, charged with the honour and responsibility of carrying a nation’s dreams towards sporting triumph.

And a nation held its breath, with excitement, and with hope.

So, yes, this story starts with football. But sadly that’s not what it’s about. Not any more.

Because while the fog of disappointment and the hurt of defeat receded relatively easily, what settled into its place was far more painful.

Disgust. Disgust, and abject dismay. Revulsion, really.

Revulsion at how quickly – a matter of seconds, a heartbeat, the time it takes for a ball to travel from penalty spot to goalmouth – a story of sporting endeavour became one of familiar, ugly racism.

Revulsion at how inevitable it was. At how unsurprising it was. At how expected it felt.

And dismay at the reality of that expectation. Dismay that a year after it felt like the latest tragedy of U.S. police violence might have a faint silver lining, in the form of a global awakening around inequality and injustice, we seemed to be back at square one. With three black, British boys being subjected to the most mindless, ignorant abuse, all anonymous of course, for the crime of having missed—

No, do you know what, I’m not even going to complete that hackneyed sentence. Because the truth is that the abuse has very little to do with football, or penalty kicks, or winning or losing. It’s about society. A society that still has coursing through its veins this poison. This taint. This mindless, primitive intolerance of perceived Other.

It might well be less than it was twenty or ten or even five years ago; I hope so. But it’s still there. And while the scale and anonymity and inadequate governance of social media platforms give it a megaphone with which to make itself seem louder than it possibly is, it’s not gone.

In 2021, when we can broadcast video back from another planet and produce a vaccine within months to protect our species, ignorant prejudice based on skin colour is not gone.

That should be something that frustrates, hurts and dismays all of us, to an order of magnitude far, far greater than not winning a football match.

Does it? Does it hurt you? Are you dismayed? Do you care enough to do something different, to speak out, to wear your values on your sleeve, to do the hard work necessary to understand how deep this problem runs and why? To give your time and energy in some small token of repayment for the decades of lost time and opportunity suffered by so many people of colour in the society that grants you automatic privilege?

Think about it. We must all think about it.

Because a nation is holding its breath, with fragile hope. Hope that change can still happen. That this is a nasty blip in an otherwise optimistic journey.

That hope might be fragile, but it is not futile. And, thankfully, the last horrible seven days have also proven that hope to have foundations that are real, and concrete.

When the mural of Marcus Rashford was defaced within hours of last Sunday’s final, I felt helpless. Helpless as a human being, as a citizen of this country, as a white man, as a Manchester United fan of 30+ years who also feels an instinctive protectiveness over any representative of the club. This was a kind, generous 23 year-old who has done more than anyone else in the country during the last year to use his position of influence to materially improve children’s and families’ lives. A genuine national hero, from an unprivileged, unwealthy background. Being graffitied upon with the illiterate scrawlings of people who don’t understand dignity or selflessness, let alone possess it.

But then something wonderful happened. One-by-one, and then in groups, the people of Manchester and beyond came out and showed that the voices of prejudice and idiocy are not the majority. Loud they may be, and aggressive, but their contorted faces and choleric anger falls quiet in the face of such peaceful and simple counter-protest. Within days, the mural was covered with thousands of posts and poems, posters and pictures, from wellwishers wanting to show that, in the words of Nahella Ashraf, a member of Manchester Stand Up to Racism, “we are the majority.”

The images on Tuesday night, of the mural bedecked in messages of support, and, in front of that mural, a crowd, spanning all ages and nationalities, ethnicities and faiths, taking the knee, filled me with something that had been lacking in the aftermath of England’s defeat and the ensuing descent into a plughole of ugliness.

Optimism. Because although the poison hasn’t gone, and the mouths spouting it haven’t been silenced, we at least have something else now. A voice. A louder one, and a unified message: when you speak with hate, you don’t speak for us. You speak for a small, sad minority that will shrink and wither and waste away until it is, finally, just so much dust and ash.

That optimism, however, comes with a caveat.

Passive awareness that change is happening is not enough. Active intervention and support is now the minimum required. For some that will mean involved activism; for others it will be enough to simply speak out and add their voice to the majority, making it more vocal, less acquiescent.  For businesses, it’s about how we speak and what we say, how we act and what we do, how we hire and who we hire.  However you intervene and demonstrate support, simply moving from one day to the next, assuming things are getting better and waiting to see what that looks like, can no longer be deemed adequate for any of us.

There’s no hiding from this.

A nation is holding its breath, with hope. And, now, expectation.