Here’s a take from “Times columnist and co-author of Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain and Britain’s Slave Trade”, Trevor Phillips.
News that the Rugby Football Union is seriously “reviewing” the singing of Swing Low Sweet Chariot could easily be taken as a bad joke. However, this is not satire. If I were given to conspiracy theories I would see a calculated plot to discredit the worldwide call for racial justice. At the very least it is a baffling turn away from issues of substance in the battle against racism, for which so many have given so much. But this madness is what happens when leadership of the movement is taken away from serious black leaders who have real skin in the game and handed to people for whom it is just another skirmish in the culture wars. It has got to stop.
Today, RFU officials are trying to explain the proposal as an attempt to educate supporters. That would have made sense. An analysis published in 2016 showed that the most popular sporting event among black viewers was the FA Cup Final, while among whites it was the rugby world cup; in England, rugby is a white sport. So there is a case for explaining to the young white crowds who follow it that this song was composed by a freed slave just after the American civil war; probably to celebrate the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses that helped runaway slaves escape to freedom. And that the song was popularised by the most successful African-American musical entertainers of the late 19th century, the Fisk Jubilee singers, that it was a favoured anthem of Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King, that it has been honoured by the US Library of Congress and that it has been sung for decades at countless black funerals and every major civil rights demonstration.
But the problem here is the same unthinking response that has led some to suggest the renaming of the Tate galleries – without even a peep of protest from the Tate itself – even though Sir Henry Tate did not enter the sugar business until 35 years after abolition, and whose company actually made most of its wealth from processing European sugar beet. The same disregard for fact in favour of narrative (a feature of the new academic “discipline”, critical race theory) led a black spokesperson to opine that for all she knew Churchill might well be a racist as “she hadn’t met him”.
I feel furious. First, the continuing obsession with symbols is torpedoing the effort to change the real world. None of this will gain a black person a single job, home or university place.
Second, if the Black Lives Matter activists were truly pursuing radical change rather than street theatre, they would tear themselves away from persecuting ghosts and statues, and take their anger to the doors of the great British companies which have no person of colour on their boards. Our captains of industry can watch the protests from afar, knowing that any black presence in their gleaming towers can be restricted to the security guy at the door and the women they never see because they come in at 5am to polish the boardroom table. And banning a song is never going to sour the champagne in the soundproof directors’ boxes at Twickenham.
And third, the claim by at least one former rugby star that “Swing Low” should cease ringing around the stadia because it has nothing to do with England, comes dangerously close to saying that “England” should return to a halcyon past where there were no black people. Black Lives Matter was supposed to amplify the demand for people of colour and our stories to be an equal part of our nation’s past, present and future. The trivialisation of our cause is beginning to write us out of all three.
