The murder by white policemen of George Floyd and the outrage the sparked the BlackLivesMatter movement gave former West India fast bowler Michael Holding an opportunity to express his view on Sky Sports on racism. One thing led to another and he ended up writing this book about racism with inputs from sportspeople - Usain Bolt, Naomi Osaka, Thierry Henry among others. He does a fine job of researching history and presents a compelling and comprehensive narrative of how being treated as the 'other' had its effects on black people, on privilege and how it feels to be treated differently because of the colour of your skin.
For example Usain Bolt says he walked into a watch store in UK and the salesperson says something that indicates that the watches may be out of his range. Bolt buys it without asking for its price just to prove that he can afford it. But it stings.
In delving into history Holding says Christ was certainly not white as they make him out to be because he was born in the Middle East. He speaks about Septimus Severus who was a Black Emperor who ruled Rome and how advanced Ghana was in terms of science and trade etc. He laughs at Columbus's claims of discovering a land that was already inhabited and how he claimed it for the Spanish! Claimed it! He traces the beginnings of the slave trade in 1562 when Admiral John Hawkins led the first slave trading voyage to the West Indies - the Dutch, South Africans and finally the British took control. He notes how 132 slaves were thrown overboard ship Zong, the Haitian revolution which had 140 years of massacres of indigenous population by Aussies (and laughably Haiti was asked to pay reparations to France for its freedom). Similarly when the British slave trade was abolished in 1807 reparations were paid to the traders which constituted of 40% of the British income. He writes of the assimilation of native children by Australians, race riots in Britain and Amritsar, 36 murdered in the Tulsa massacre, black sharecroppers being used in medical experiments, the Bengal famine where 40 lakh died, 2 crore died in the Indian partition, 69 backs murdered in Sharpeville, murders of Mlcolm X, Martin Luther King, how Nixon's war on drugs was aimed at the blacks, Kissinger's report that tried to slow down black population, the Windrush scandal, Stephen Lawrence, Breonna Taylor, Ahmand Arbery, Michael Brown.
He talks of how black people founded Los Angeles (52 early settlers), were instrumental in discovery of inoculation, fire extinguishers, door knobs, elevators, jazz, carbon filaments, stethoscope, Of heroes like Rosa Parks, Tommie Smith (black glove at Mexico Olympics), Stephen Biko and his Columbus song, Colin Kaepernick, Mandela, Obama...
Michael Holding makes a powerful case of how they were made to kneel - all that was dehumanising, slavery, lynchings, fear and how they rise through their excellence in sports, music, culture, dance, science, business. A case for relooking at history anew. It surely opened my eyes to many new things.
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