While Rafiq spoke with bravery and honesty about his pain, Tom Harrison offered only evasion and self-preservationIt seems that Yorkshire County Cricket Club were right about Azeem Rafiq all along. He really is a natural-born leader. Just not in the way they’d hoped.On Tuesday morning Rafiq sat for an hour and three quarters in the parliamentary committee room of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee. He spoke for most of that time, stopping occasionally to gather himself. In the process he delivered a devastating, fearlessly detailed description of institutional racism shared live and unedited with the British public. Continue reading...
The treatment of the former off-spinner shows how those with status bend the world to their whim without real consequencesIn 2016 Azeem Rafiq returned to Yorkshire, the club and the county where – as we now know – he had encountered racist abuse and ritual humiliation since he was a child. On Tuesday morning in parliament the Conservative MP Damian Green, who was sacked from the government in 2017 for lying about the discovery of pornography on his office computer in 2008, wanted to know why.Green was by no means the first person to pose this question. Since Rafiq first went public with his experiences last autumn he has been hounded on social media by members of the public demanding...
England’s Test captain has done a lot of good over the past few years on and off the pitch but he has been evasive over the Yorkshire CCC racism scandal“I think … when I look back … I can’t …”Imagine being Joe Root right now. For the past two summers you’ve engaged sincerely with the need to broaden your sport. You’ve taken the knee. You’ve stood for the cameras in a T-shirt covered in uplifting slogans. You’ve engaged with issues beyond the remit of any previous England captain. You’ve spoken proudly of the diversity in your team, in a way that does make a difference, and not only to the optics-panic of your employers at the ECB. Continue reading...
Racist behaviour does not occur in a vacuum, and the ultimate lesson here is how many of our structures are indictedThe allegations of systematic racism made against Yorkshire County Cricket Club by Azeem Rafiq first surfaced in August 2020. Rafiq gave a wide-ranging interview to the Wisden journalist Taha Hashim, ostensibly about his work providing free meals for key workers during the pandemic. But he also spoke about the racism he experienced at Yorkshire, including an “openly racist” captain, a dressing room in which racist comments were regarded as humorous, and a culture in which complaints about racist behaviour were ignored and turned against him.Yorkshire refused to comment. And you wonder, 15 months on, how they might reflect on that...
Will I go and see Yorkshire next season? Probably, but the Rafiq affair has forced me to revaluate my relationship with the clubI wake up this morning desperately sad and ashamed. I’m not a member of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, but I watch them play three or four times a year. Those are some of my favourite moments of the summer and I look forward to the season starting and I hate it coming to an end, but all that feels tainted now.The thing I can’t get over, that almost makes me tear up, is that young lad, Azeem Rafiq, a gifted cricketer, sitting in the dressing room, probably doing something he’d always wanted to do, but feeling completely undermined....