Clarke Carlisle seems to take a balanced honest rational greenygrey view on his life and football in his new autobiography, You Don’t Know Me, But …: A Footballer’s Life; in which he has provoked controversy for criticising more extreme anti-racism campaigning footballers like Rio Ferdinand. We supported Carlisle’sKick Racism Out campaign last year.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X meet before a press conference for a debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was the only time the two men ever met; their meeting lasted only one minute. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
While the Greenygrey doesn’t want any prejudice in British sport and society, it also doesn’t want selfish and greedy people stirring up trouble where it is not needed.
Last year, Rio Ferdinand led a campaign that seemed totally out of proportion to the problem. After a couple of racist footballer cases, one of them by a South American, Ferdinand seemed to take inspiration from Malcolm X‘s black power movement, while Clarke Carlisle seemed more like Martin Luther King.
Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Ferdinand’s raising of the agenda to critical point in the media led to some crowd incidents; with Ferdinand, the media and crowds like a perfect storm feeding off each for a while.
This was in a modern football culture where Congolese Fabrice Muamba had been cheered at every ground after surviving a cardiac arrest on the pitch while playing for Bolton.
English: David James as a player of England national football team Русский: Дэвид Джеймс в составе сборной Англии по футболу (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Moreover, England goalie David James said he’d never experienced any racism in English footballduring his long career. James also said in anIndependent article that he thought anti-racism groups were just trying to stir things up to justify their existence.
Peter Herbert’s Society of Black Lawyers
Into the perfect storm appeared Peter Herbert and the Society of Black Lawyers. While Herbert might be a good lawyer, and done good things in other cases, he apparently suffered racism in his childhood, and admitted he knew nothing about football. So he was hardly likely to take a greenygrey balanced view like Carlisle. However, the British media has still given him wide coverage.
Moreover, Herbert’s also caused trouble forTottenham Hotspur’s Jewish fans, citing them as racist for calling themselves a ‘Y’ term I don’t want to use because I’m not Jewish, so would almost certainly be considered racist by Herbert and his cronies. 
The Jewish fans use the term as a self-defence, in the same way as some black people use the ‘N’ word; and Marc Latham uses the ‘C’ word. So Herbert diving into the football world without much knowledge criticising the Spurs fans as ‘racist’ is like a Jewish lawyer diving into the music world and calling black rappers racist for using the ‘N’ word.
