Racism still pervades every aspect of every stratum of our society though we are publicly agreed that it is bad, and as such, the treatment of Eni Aluko by the England women’s coaching team and subsequent cover-up by the Football Association was not especially surprising. And yet the breadth and depth of it all remains staggering, a catalogue of callousness which captures just how wrong we can still get things.
In the first instance, Mark Sampson, the team manager, singled out Drew Spence, a mixed race player, asking her how many times she had been arrested. No complaint was made, nor was it when he told Aluko to make sure that visiting relatives from Nigeria didn’t “bring Ebola with them”. But sometime later Aluko, an international of 11 years’ standing, was asked to participate in a review of team culture so reported the incidents. There followed an internal investigation in which no one spoke to Spence though she had put in a written report, and amazingly, nothing untoward was discovered.
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