The minority racist barracking of Kevin Campbell
by
Mickey Blue Eyes

Before you read this polemic you better know something of how my opinions were formed.

But before you do even that: If you are a racist, closet or otherwise, or a member of the National Front or similar, go no further. If this description applies to you this piece will cause apoplexy or extreme indigestion on your part. Which suits me fine because I think you are only fit to be flushed down the nearest sewer with the old apartheid regime of South Africa, Pinochet and co., assorted Dixie loonies and fascists and totalitarians old and new. Go screw yourself with a barbed wire loofah. You are not wanted at Goodison Park. You are beyond appeals to your decency because you do not have any.

A large part of my working life was spent in a society owned and run by black men, a society with expatriate workers from all over the planet. Most of the senior management positions were filled by white westerners because we had the necessary technical and administrative experience. Operatives were mostly from developing countries. In such multilingual, multicultural circumstances you learned quickly how to sum people up or you were done for. The phrase is Shape Up Or Ship Out. Very appropriate, then and for the purposes of this opinion. In the end you learned the hard way that the only thing which truly matters is how individuals behave with each other and how they perform their tasks. The colour of somebody's skin didn't enter into it, not unless you had the emotional development of a jelly.

I was in an excellent position to see the damage caused by racism and sectarianism of all types and by all colours and shades of skin. The people who practiced it had one thing in common: A kind of paranoid brutality and the need of all weak men to blame circumstances on an easily identified victim. The colour of skin is the easiest of all methods.

So, you know where I am going:

(a) Generally, I am going to attack crazy racism amongst a tiny minority of footy fans

and

(b) Specifically, I am going to attack the loonies who have singled out Kevin Campbell as a scapegoat for the way our team performs.

It needs to be said good and loud that footy in this country is still riddled with racism. Every club has its racists. And we are no better and no worse than anyone else. This is at the heart of the current official FA campaign, Kick Out Racism. This muck must be roundly attacked now before it reaches the evil level of Italian football. But we Evertonians need to start at home and clean out our own house too.

There is no need for mealy-mouthed "confusion" here. Racism refers to the hounding by some fans of BLACK players in our game. Yes, there are some sophisticated arguments but let us not fool ourself, usually they are deployed to obscure the kind of neanderthal fans' behaviour required as a matter of routine by SS and Chilean concentration camp guards and South African apartheid police. We all know it and we ignore the implications at the risk of losing our cultural sanity and social cohesion. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Spain and totalitarian communist Russia remains the main evil template.

Do we want the same kind of label attached by Hans Frank on the scaffold: "The guilt of Germany will last a thousand years"? Despite the best lunatic efforts of Ayn Rand and her minor English disciple Margaret Thatcher there IS and always will be such a thing as society. If we build a society based on racism then don't be surprised at the result. History has provided examples in tragic abundance. Life is what we make of it, not the other way round. And we are not completely powerless. We still live in a relatively open society, though there is a giant need for radical improvement.

The most recent example is the racist hounding of Liverpool's young black player, Emile Heskey at home and abroad. Thankfully, FIFA are to take action against Boavista. I hope it is as severe as possible. The level of dull eyed acceptance (even among some black players) may be best summed up by the shrug of some of Boavista's black players that it was "usual" and just part of barracking. Social and cultural osmosis is at work. Evil never arrives suddenly. It grows slowly, each time ratcheting the requirements until it seems impossible to fight back. You have to engage it early and cut out the cancer as far as possible. And then be ready to get up in the morning and do it all over again. Justified cliché time: "Those who ignore history are condemned to relive it."

Paul Ince has just confirmed that he was on the verge of organising black players in Italy to fight back against the garbage they had to tolerate at every match. It still goes on there and shows no sign of letting up. No surprise that Italian football is rotten with corruption on and off the field, not when the present national leader, neo-fascist Silvio Berlusconi, is also a footy club owner - whatever the paper work might or might not say.

The only thing which changes from country to country and club to club is the level of intensity. Circumstances vary. Nobody, NOBODY, is free of it. Therefore, anyone who uses weak PR phrases such as "Claiming the moral high ground" is a victim of the kind of one dimensional slop which has generally replaced real thought and action. If we are to retain any sense of civilisation we have to attack racism at every level and do it openly and comprehensively. Anything less, and we can automatically abandon any claims to a superior form of values. Football is merely one of the levels. Nor is it the only sport affected. Few can forget the long ago sight of black American athletes in the Olympic Games raising their arms and bowing their heads in shame at their nation's own different apartheid methods. Times have changed, but only in degree and locale. You need look no further than Oldham, Burnley and Bradford.

As a start I would like to see FIFA try to persuade every club everywhere in the world to maintain a full page of anti-racist polemic and follow it up by pressuring every government to tighten up the laws. First, isolate the loonies. Then make them even more illegal. Again, yes, sophistications are involved but they are not impossible to resolve. In Germany for example it is rightly illegal to deny The Holocaust or display nazi regalia. Anybody who does so faces the weight of the law. In a supposedly open society it is right to judge a nation by its laws and the administration of them. Modern Germany rightly has a fear of nazism and acts accordingly most times it reappears. There is no reason why we can't do the same thing with racism. A lot of the laws are already in place. What it needs is determined political and economic action. Football, essentially trivial in nature but important in its widespread appeal, cannot place itself above the law. Time for more action.

Evertonians can play their part by acting against increasingly vociferous racist idiots in our own ranks. It is no defence to say we are no better or worse than anyone else. You don't judge the condition of your own home by those of your neighbours. You set your own standards.

Recently I heard for the first time the supposedly "humorous" racist muck levelled against Heskey by a small group of Evertonians. It made me sick and ashamed to the pit of my stomach, just as did the even worse hooting of John Barnes some years ago - which thankfully has now passed into the sewer. But I haven't the slightest doubt that it would return if we relaxed our condemnation of it. Me, I leave nobody in any doubt as to my opinion of it. That is my small way of contributing to anti-racism, be it ever so small. So is this polemic.

Nor will it wash to say it is only part of winding up the ironically nicknamed pinkies. Like all Evertonians I have enjoyed poking fun at their absurd primeval posturing on footy matters but that is quite different from racist abuse. Laughing at chauvinist footy pomposity does not extend to jeering at the colour of a man's skin, not with history still fresh with memory of white genocide of other people of different skin colour. As Clive James once said, "Jewish Holocaust jokes will only be allowable when every last victim is beyond wincing at the memory." Do the maths yourself.

And so we come to Kevin Campbell and our own specific brand of rotten racism. Have we forgotten already that it was a Turkish brand of racism which led to him joining us in the first place? Is that to be the measure of how we behave?

It needs to be said straight away that SuperKev is having a wretched run of form. He has said it himself. He is a very proud exuberant man and needs no reminder of how badly he has missed opportunities he would normally bury cold. Nor does he need any further reminder of how that awful injury still affects his play. It is the kind of run every professional player of every sport has to endure. They all know it. You can be sure he is as mortified by the indefinable reason as anyone. At the back of his mind might even lurk the fear that he can't cut it at the top level any more. He is as mortal as the rest of us.

But where Kevin is concerned there is a creeping tendency amongst some Evertonians to label him (and nobody else) "lazy." Make no mistake, this is the kind of closet racism which disfigures our game. It has to be dealt with accordingly. Of course, Kevin Campbell isn't "lazy" at all. Quite the opposite. On Saturday, it very nearly got to the point where he was jeered off the field as he was helped off injured. Nearly, but not quite. The excuse will be that it was actually cheers for the oncoming Yin. I know different because I have been watching the game too long and I know fans' behaviour too well.

I reached the end of my patience with these inadequate racist dickheads over the space of a few matches, one of which was the League Cup home match to Palace. I was in the Park End at the behest of The Editor and I was already frozen with horror at the September 11th atrocity in the USA. I needed racism like I needed a hole in the head. Behind me, a complete plantpot engaged his neighbour for the whole match on the subject of Kevin Campbell and how it was almost his entire fault (and nobody elses) that things weren't going right. Every time Kev went near the ball, said plantpot came out with, "Come on YEW" with the kind of emphasis which left you in no doubt as to the plantpot's mindset. It was sickening, and I have heard it repeated too often since. At Blackburn I finally turned on one of the perpetrators and gave him both verbal barrels at short range. Enough is enough. Hence this piece too.

When Kevin Campbell became our first black captain I was just as pleased and proud as he was, I really was. We all know what his goals did for us and we all know that he is the first over to the fans at the end of EVERY match he completes. If I was still of a mind to have playing idols he would be my first. His achievements and example are beyond argument, form notwithstanding. You can see the evidence on his video. When I saw him on crutches I thought he would never play again. He has not fully recovered from it. Such is his old style enthusiasm he played when really he should not have. But there is still nobody at the club who could fulfill his role and all sensible fans know it.

None of which means he is guaranteed his place anymore than The Big Yin or anyone else is. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't know professional football. Those who whinge he will never be dropped because somehow he is a favourite of Walter Smith's aren't living in the real world. Smiffy won't hesitate to drop anybody he figures can't or won't do the job. And he'll only do that if we have an adequate replacement - which of course we don't have. Eventually Kevin will conquer his present run of bad form and for me that moment can't come soon enough.

On top of this we have the nonsense of how much he is allegedly earning. Racists almost always add this to the ludicrous "lazy" tag to reinforce their gutless attacks on him. It even gets linked to reasons for the departures of The Ears and Bally. The figure generally bandied around is £30,000 per week, which is complete garbage. So, indirectly, Kevin is also supposedly culpable because two promising but unproved young players left the club because we wouldn't pay them the same amount. You don't know whether to laugh, cry, shit, shave or shampoo when you get this kind of mad argument.

The aggregate of all this is the kind of "reasoning" all racists use to justify their despicable intentions. It goes without saying that they are cowards who can't even admit the truth to themselves, that they have found their scapegoat for our current poor playing fortunes and, conveniently for them, he has a black skin. It may provide them with some sort of short term, weak willed satisfaction but you can be sure the same people will find another target should they need to. It isn't entirely down to racism of course, as Mark Pembridge will testify. But it forms 99% of the motivation where Kevin Campbell is concerned.

It doesn't appear to cross the mind of these idiots that they disgrace our club and deliver us up to the media tosspots and others who thrive on this sort of thing, the ones with the intellectual capacity of a gnat, the ones for whom a label can be attached gleefully and unscrupulously to all of us instead of just the guilty parties. Nor is it likely to have crossed what passes for their "minds" what the long term affects are likely to be. Which means they would likely completely miss the point of gadfly Gore Vidal's old story on this subject. Years ago he was addressing an international audience and pointed out the simple logistics of demography: Non-white peoples form the vast majority of humankind. Eventually, history will ensure this tells in their favour. The only question at issue is how long it will take. When he looked up from the lectern all he could see was a group of glum white faces in a sea of grinning pearly teeth in black faces.

It also doesn't appear to have occurred to the guilty parties that some of the greatest players who ever graced the game were black men. Arguably the greatest of all being Edson Arantes dos Nascimento, Pelé to you.

So I am all in favour of kicking out racism as far as my boots can propel it. But let's start at home first.