With Usain Bolt
When Usain Bolt was around twenty years old, making his way as a sprinter, he was in London for an athletics meet. He had some time off so thought he’d go to do some shopping. He walked into a mall. After a while he noticed a security guard was following him. Strange, he thought, but maybe it was coincidence. He went into a jewellery store because he was interested in buying a watch. ‘I said to the woman behind the counter, “I like this one… how much?” She tells me. And she says, “Are you sure you can afford it?” I was thinking, Why is she assuming I can’t afford the watch?’
‘That wouldn’t happen now.’ Well, he’s right about that.
When I was a similar age, the exact same thing happened to me. I asked to see a watch that was in the showcase and, before the lady took it out, she told me the price with a tone suggesting I could not afford it. It was as if she wanted to save herself the effort. I detected the attitude immediately and just said, ‘I’ll take it’ before she even took it out, just to mentally give her a jolt. It cost more than I’d wanted to spend but there was no way I was going to give her the pleasure of saying in her mind, ‘I knew it.’
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
In Usain’s case, it is a ridiculous and shocking story because he is now one of the most famous people in the world. He is probably the most famous Black man in the world. Everywhere he goes people know who he is. The fastest man in history. Some might say he is one of the finest physical specimens ever. And yet, back then, he was made to feel like he was nothing.
‘I just remember thinking, Could you show me the watch? I didn’t understand,’ he says. ‘And I didn’t think back then, “This is racist”, because it was new to me in that moment. But remembering racism, in a sense, is an education and a learning experience. And you might tell that story and someone else goes, “That happened to me.” So as an experience it was unpleasant but good comes from telling it. And it was a shock for that first time coming from Jamaica.’
Usain remembers that story – and I remember mine – because of the way it made us feel. It hurt. And it still does. That’s because we were both made out to be sub-human. Dehumanisation. There are a lot of stories like that in this book. They are not coincidences, either.
I got the chance to fire some questions at Usain just after he recovered from a bout of Covid. He was a cool customer, exactly like his reputation. But that demeanour was at odds with what he was saying, because he told of the pain and anguish about what was happening to Black people. I was very keen to compare notes on life growing up in Jamaica. What was his upbringing like? What were his views of racism at the time? What was he taught at school? But first of all, I sensed a real desire to make his voice heard about race because he has so rarely been asked about it.
‘It hurts to see it. My heart bleeds to see the atrocities still happening. In this day and age, why would it still exist? We’re all bleeding emotionally and psychologically.’
As we know, Usain (eight Olympic golds) is one of the finest athletes of all time and the greatest ever sprinter. His fame, his athleticism, his character make him stand out. He is proud of his Blackness. And Black people are proud of him. As a man of almost superhuman quality, he personifies what Black people can achieve if they are just given the chance. But does that superhuman quality mean he is almost ‘protected’ from the everyday racism that his brethren experience? He doesn’t like the word ‘protected’.
‘I’m not sure “protected” is right. Okay, I don’t get followed by security guards any more. You might not be in a situation to be abused on the streets or to be kneeled on or choked. But you see it around you and, as a Black man, you’d be like, “Whoa, those things are still happening today.” It’s affecting you mentally like anybody else. The things that you’re seeing of late, nobody’s thinking, Oh, I’m protected.’
But we were protected in another way. For two young men from Jamaica those stories about the watch are early experiences of racism. What is significant about what happened to us might not seem too obvious. But we had grown up in a country where there was very little racism by the time we came along. Jamaica was, and is, a predominantly Black country. It wasn’t always that way, of course. When Jamaica became a British colony, it was 82 per cent white. As a slave plantation producing tobacco, cotton and then sugar, the population began to change quickly. But although Black people would outnumber whites, you’ve got to remember who was in charge. And it wasn’t Black people.
Jamaicans resented British rule, racism, and the all-powerful Colonial Office. But from 1944 the country underwent what was called ‘constitutional decolonisation’, which means that we as a people started to be able to make our own decisions. Total independence from Britain came in 1962. And the days of white rule, segregated areas and white-on-Black racism were becoming only memories. I was born in 1954. A decade earlier Jamaica was a totally different country. Twenty years before that even more so. The 1960 census reported a white population of 0.7 per cent and that had fallen to 0.18 per cent by 2001. So you can see why racism would disappear and has disappeared. And in those moments Usain and I have described it was disturbing and upsetting to suddenly be confronted with the reality of life. I guess you could say I had enjoyed a sheltered upbringing until that point.
And this is one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to Usain. Maybe I was seeking some sort of reassurance. Was he naive like me about the hard, brutal reality of what was happening away from our island home?
‘We grew up in a rural area; we didn’t know racism,’ he says. ‘You didn’t know that thing existed. It was very community-based, very loving, very community-centric. We weren’t aware of racism at such a tender age. We were just kids having fun, playing cricket, playing football. So in the context of the rural community, we just would not have experienced that.’
Snap. Usain and I had the same upbringing, despite us growing up a generation apart. We were the sort of boys to be out at play all day, kicking a football around, playing marbles, riding bikes or making a ball out of tape and string to play Catchy Shubby – a version of cricket which was chaotic because there seemed to be about twenty or thirty people taking part. We used an old bin for the ‘stumps’; Usain used to carve three stumps into a tree. Matches would last hours. Moms would be calling out to come in for supper as the sun went down.
The kids we were playing with? They almost all looked pretty much the same as me but the few who didn’t, we didn’t notice. We were kids having fun.
Usain lived in Sherwood, a small village among the trees and bush. So he had his circle of friends and they were Black. There was no ‘otherness’ to make him question differences in culture or identity. I grew up on Dunrobin Avenue in Kingston, which was a small residential area on the outskirts of the city and completely underdeveloped when my parents moved there. By the time I came along, there were some white and Chinese families living on the road but they didn’t mix with us. At least the seniors didn’t. The kids would play a bit with us sometimes but would rush home before their parents came back home from work. But I didn’t give it a second thought. I just guessed that they had their own things to do or own games to play, or maybe their parents were just very strict and they didn’t want them to know they had left the yard when they weren’t there. I didn’t think, Oh, they’re not supposed to be mixing with us because they have different skin colour.
‘The only thing I experienced in Jamaica close to racism was classism,’ Usain says. ‘I remember living in a certain apartment complex and the neighbours weren’t pleased that a young guy from my background – and I guess that means coming from a small village – was living next to them. Some people don’t like to see young people doing well.’
In school, there was no education around racism save for what happened during the slave trade. ‘Jamaica’s an ex-colony,’ Usain says. ‘So we were taught with that colonial influence. You would never be taught about racism.’
If you wanted to find out, though, you educated yourself. When you go round the world you want to understand more. You see how different cultures work and so a natural curiosity kicks in. That happened to me, eventually, although I spent a long time putting that re-education off. Without it, though, I wouldn’t be writing this book.
Usain, at the same age, is further ahead. He tells me that when he was in high school he started to take an interest in what was actually happening outside of the Caribbean, in places like America and the UK. When he wasn’t running, playing football or playing cricket, he would talk with his friend Nugent, who he has known since he was four, about Black history. Nugent, a history graduate, is now his manager.
‘We spent a lot of time discussing great achievements in Africa,’ Usain says. ‘And people don’t know that Africa used to be a major centre for worldwide trade before slavery destroyed that. We talked about how there was a civilisation in the Caribbean long before Christopher Columbus came to these islands. And the great mathematical and scientific achievements of Africa. There’s plenty to show Black pride in. It’s important that our schools also teach about the brilliance of our ancestors and not just being slaves on the plantation. Maybe they could teach about the great Muhammad Ali, too.’ You could add Marcus Garvey, among others, to that list. Garvey was Jamaica’s first national hero and he helped to inspire America’s civil rights movement by arguing for Black economic independence and for African-Americans to show pride in their heritage.
There was no real education about racism at home, either, or what was happening to Black people elsewhere in the world. I am sure I never even heard my mother use the word ‘racism’. Family life, or parents instilling discipline and passing on knowledge, was instead all about being polite, looking smart and working hard.
‘Yeah, those sorts of negative things or feelings… we wouldn’t have dwelled on them. My parents wanted me to be happy and positive. They wanted to encourage me to push on and achieve. Don’t give room to the naysayers. Maybe they thought if they had talked about such things it could have made me worried about the future. I’m not an athlete who is angry and trying to say, “You were wrong.” God blessed me with a talent and I tried to make the best out of it.’
I guess you could argue that with minimal racism in a country, why does anyone need to talk about it? People are not being denied opportunities because of the colour of their skin. They are not being abused on every other day they leave the house or treated differently.
But I have briefly spoken about it with my children when they were making their way in the world. My youngest daughter, Tiana, she never really understood racism. She couldn’t quite comprehend the attitude of some African-Americans she came across in her early days after moving to America. Why? Because she was born and spent her early years in Jamaica, too. And when she moved to the United States she grew up in a West Indian-dominated community. So she was shielded from it. She only truly got it when the Black Lives Matter movement began. When she saw my Sky Sports speech she posted on Facebook. Here’s a section of what she wrote:
What people have missed, including me for a long time, is that Black people are not just angry, Black people are sad and Black people are tired. Black people are not trying to say Black lives are worth more than others. We Black and brown people just want to be able to have the same rights white people have had for centuries. That’s all.
A dad finally getting a daughter to listen and pay attention? I think those who know how tough that can be will forgive me for feeling a sense of pride when I saw it. Tiana didn’t come to the realisation until she moved to America because there would have been no reason for me to talk to her about the problem while she was growing up in Jamaica. But, as we know, Black folks in America, and to a lesser degree in the UK, have to be coaching their kids, and in particular their boys, in how to deal with life every day in a society where they are ‘other’, and especially in their interaction with the police.
Usain has that all to come. He became a dad to baby Olympia in May 2020. He knows that with the world the way it is, he is going to have to (all in good time) probably teach his daughter about its harsher side.
‘As a father now I want to protect. Every decent human being is worried and concerned that the colour of a person’s skin can determine if they’re getting opportunity or if they’re being scrutinised. It’s a harsh reality that Black people walk around with.
‘It’s only when I started to travel, you realise that reality, though. People have different views of who you are. When you are in a different country you see the news. And it’s different. And you will understand the context.’
Usain is thirty-four years old. And that could have been me talking at the same age. I travelled. I saw it. I heard it. And then I came home again. And did I talk about it with my parents? Not really. We didn’t dwell on the things that happened when I was away. I wanted to concentrate on my sport and career. Get on with building a life. And for Usain, the same is true. When you are the fastest man the world has ever seen, life tends to get pretty busy and your mind is occupied. When I got back to Jamaica after a cricket tour or a stint playing county cricket in England, the last thing I wanted to do was rake over all the racist incidents during a chat with my parents. And, boy, was there a lot of that stuff.
On my first tour to Australia as a West Indies player in 1975 I was abused from the crowd in Perth, Western Australia. ‘Go back to the trees!’ That sort of thing would be headline news now, although as I type this, I have to say that I’ve just read a story about India players getting abuse from the crowd in a Test match in Sydney. Back then, I just shrugged and thought, Glad I don’t live in this country. But 2020 and it’s still going on? Pathetic.
When we were travelling around Australia I distinctly remember being in an elevator with my team-mates and, on the way down from our floor to the lobby, the lift stopped on a floor below ours. The doors opened to reveal a middle-aged white guy who was awaiting the lift to go down as well, but when he saw four or five big Black guys, he stepped back. Fine. Maybe he was intimidated, we were a tall bunch. But as the doors shut, he shouted a racist slur. And do you know what we all did? We laughed. We thought it was funny that there were people as stupid as that in a country like Australia. In the Caribbean, where we all came from, we didn’t encounter such behaviour.
My next overseas tour was in 1976 to England. I was there again in 1980. There the abuse came mainly in the form of letters delivered to the dressing room. Most were seeking autographs, but there were quite a few letters that were uncomplimentary to put it mildly. They went in the bin. I can’t remember the precise words but I’m sure all the old favourites were in them. ‘You Black this, you Black that, go back to your own country.’
On the field of play I never had an opposition player say anything untoward. But I do remember a moment in a game when I was ‘guesting’ in a reserve match for a professional team before I started playing county cricket, when I was made aware of the colour of my skin. We had just taken a wicket and were talking in a huddle about what the next move would be and one of my team-mates said something along the lines of ‘get the Black so-and-so on to bowl’. Anyone who watched the West Indies team in my era will know that whenever a wicket fell, the entire team gathered together, whether to celebrate or just chat among ourselves until the next batsman appeared. Even those fielding right on the boundary edge made the trek in but that was peculiar to us, not many other teams did it and especially not county teams. This player obviously didn’t realise that I had made my way in from my fielding position. It stung.
And I’ve come across racism in pretty much every corner of the globe that I’ve travelled to down the years. That includes when I was playing as well as when I wasn’t. It’s taken on almost a different form, too, because I am often accompanied by my wife, Laurie-Ann, who is white. She is from Antigua but has Portuguese heritage. We’ve walked into a hotel in South Africa and, while I’m being attended to, someone else behind the desk will approach her and ask if she needs help to check in. She’s standing right beside me but of course, in their mind, there is no way she could be with me.
When on holiday in Nassau we’ve turned up at a restaurant with a booking and the maitre d’ will look at her, not me, and enquire about our reservation. At the end of the meal the waiter hands her the bill. Obviously, she came to Nassau and picked up this Black guy on the beach. The guys attending on us are Black. The brainwashing and unconscious bias work both ways. We laugh about that one. But if we weren’t laughing, we’d be crying. And there are loads more stories like those. The situations I have recounted are the ones that stick in the memory for one reason or another. And they each have the same impact. They strip away your humanity, they take away your feelings of self-worth. You feel as though you don’t belong and, I suppose, on a very basic level, that you are not wanted or liked. I think all human beings can relate to that. Like me, loathe me or be indifferent – that’s cool. Just don’t form a negative opinion about me because of the colour of my skin. It’s irrelevant.
‘I just want to keep preaching love,’ Usain says. ‘And hope that we can see something change.’
Maybe he’s right.
I want to tell one story about a man from Jamaica who was one of the kindest men I have ever met. He was someone who preached love and understanding. And, one day, he’d had enough. This was in 1940s Jamaica, when there was a small white tourist enclave where Black people couldn’t go. Didn’t want to go anyway.
His name was Evon Blake. He used to take me, his son Paul and my brother, Ralph Junior, on outings every now and again. He even took us on train rides, and I remember one very memorable trip to Port Antonio where we went for a fancy lunch at one of the big hotels. ‘Don’t drink while having your meal,’ he taught us. ‘And only tomato juice after.’ Man, I hated that thing. He owned a very successful magazine and was a hugely respected journalist and businessman.
Anyway, one day he went down to the whites-only Myrtle Bank Hotel. He got his swimming costume on and he jumped in the swimming pool. All the white people jumped out.
‘Mr Blake, you have to get out,’ the panicked manager said.
‘No!’ shouted Evon. ‘Call the prime minister! Call God!’
Evon, one of the more financially independent Black men in Jamaica, had his own pool at home. But his accountant could swim at Myrtle Bank because he was white. Evon could not. He decided to change that.
Now, this happened in 1948 when racism against Black people was rife in Jamaica because of colonisation. The rumour at the time was that he was arrested and they drained the pool, cleaned it and then filled it back up. No white person would get in again until they’d done that because they thought he was somehow dirty. And I did not even find out myself until I was doing research for this book that the last part of the story was in fact just rumour. He was never arrested, the pool was never drained.
By the way, his daughter, Barbara Blake-Hannah, would become the first Black television reporter in England when she started working for the current affairs show Today in 1968. Until viewers complained they didn’t want to see a Black face and she was sacked.
I tell that story for two reasons. First, because Evon’s actions helped to bring to an end whites-only tourist and expat spots in Jamaica. And, second, when I left Jamaica on my travels and started having my own experiences of white supremacy, I did not think about what Evon, a close family friend, had done. I had, oddly, forgotten it. Or chosen to forget it. He had highlighted a problem. But it was one that did not interest me. He had highlighted a way to make change. But it was a change that I didn’t think was required. It didn’t make me stop and think: now, why did Evon do that? What did he know that I did not? Later on, when I saw and heard racism, I didn’t recall his actions. I didn’t say to myself, ‘Evon made a stand, I could do the same.’ Why was that?