Sadly, bigotry won’t die easily

In 2007, travelling on a train in England, I was offered a cup of coffee by a scary man. He seemed angry, dangerously stupid and drunk. He walked down the aisle carrying two paper cups of coffee, took the seat opposite me, placed one cup on the table in front of me and, pointing at it, barked an order in what seemed to be an East European language — but the intent was clear: “Drink!”

He wanted me to drink coffee, I didn’t want to. He seemed the sort to negotiate with his fists — rightly, too, for he was a head taller and a ton heavier. Luckily, he lapsed into a reverie, induced possibly by liquor or drugs.

The (white) British man next to me said in a low voice: “Don’t worry, there are enough people here to help if things get nasty.” Fortunately, the journey ended without incident.

But why I, in a railcar full of white people? Well, the coffee-enforcer was going by the colour code of Britain. He knew that a non-native, minority brown person would be easier to browbeat than the native white man next to me. It’s a no-brainer — UK’s 87 per cent people are white; white people have the highest incomes, 63 per cent higher than black households. Even with a mind addled by liquor, the coffee man respected the colour code — you don’t mess with the majority.

The coffee incident flashed before the mind’s eye when three black footballers representing England misfired in the penalty shootout in the final of the European Championships last weekend. Penalty-missers are generally offered kindness and comfort — their pain at letting the team down exceeds the pain fans feel at a loss.

Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, however, carried the burden of colour, too. Team sports attempt to obliterate individual identities and build a unitary identity — Team England. But loss leads to swift disintegration in the eyes of the bigoted fans. For them, when a black man shines, it’s Team England’s triumph; when a black man falters, it’s that individual’s failure — even treachery. High expectations and great disappointment stoke fires of bigotry. Liquor adds fuel to the fire.

In India, it could be caste or religion that marks people as different and worthy of contempt. North-eastern footballers or South Indian cricketers will confirm this.

When would we see a person as just a person, not a representative of a religion, caste or ethnicity? It won’t happen in a hurry — racism and bigotry are probably written into our DNA. Researchers say fearing and distrusting the unfamiliar — the ‘out group’ — made sense in times when your very life depended on it. Living in small clusters, early human beings needed to protect their resources — just like the apes from whom they evolved. Water, a safe and secure place of habitation, and food sources had to be protected. Territory had to be defended, for new entrants wanted the same resources. It made sense to be suspicious of those who were different, and to trust those who were similar, i.e. members of the ‘in group’.

Strength lay in numbers — from this comes the pre-modern idea of converting people to your own tribe or religion, in order to gain more land and corner resources.

On our planet, humans are dominant because they are the most cooperative species; Yuval Noah Harari says it’s imagination that’s the secret of this dominance. “Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers,” he writes.

Humans can fight in the name of an imagined creator and for an unproven heaven. Diverse people can unite for an imagined tribe in sport — a Manchester United football fan from Chandigarh, for instance, can instantly bond with one from Shanghai or Sydney. The flip side is that they will also have animus for, say, the tribe of Manchester City without ever meeting its members.

Sport brings out the best and worst of human beings. The worst is often in the form of racism, as three black English players would testify. Sadly, bigotry won’t die easily.