The discussion needs to go on every day and every week, once the protests have died down and live sport has started again
The Premier League has decided that next week, black lives will matter. Or at least, it has decreed – at the behest of several club captains – that for the opening round of fixtures when the season resumes next week, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” can be borne on players’ shirts, in place of their names. It hasn’t formally decided whether black lives will matter beyond next week or for the rest of the season. But rest assured it will be consulting key stakeholders and making an announcement in due course.
All flippancy aside, it’s perhaps instructive to mark out the steps that have brought us to this point. In and of itself, the shirt messages are a laughably piffling gesture: a bit of fabric stitched to another bit of fabric, a show of support with the emphasis on the former rather than the latter. Yet it’s a gesture that would still have been inconceivable just a few years ago; perhaps even a few weeks ago, before the killing of George Floyd incited a wave of righteous fury that has challenged the very assumptions and orthodoxies upon which our society was built and in so doing forced all of us – sport included – to take a look at ourselves.
Written by Jonathan Liew
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/jun/13/black-lives-matter-sports-underlying-failure-racism under the title “
“. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
