Michael Holding: ‘I’m not naive enough to think racism will die – but I want to educate people’

Michael Holding’s life had been a portrait of how not to be politically active. As a young man, part of the towering West Indian fast bowling attack of the Seventies and Eighties, Holding would travel the cricketing world skewering batsmen then retreat to his Jamaican idyll uncontaminated by racism’s insidious creep.

Trips to the United States, England, Australia and South Africa opened his eyes to the problem but, with his return to the Caribbean always promised, he did not see it as an issue for him. It was, of course, but he chose not to see it. He was running away. What changed?

He was asked a question. Had it not rained during that fateful Test match last July in Southampton, Why We Kneel, How We Rise might still be a jumble of thoughts. Following the murder of George Floyd two months earlier in the US, Holding agreed to contribute with fellow commentator Ebony Rainford-Brent to a Sky programme on racism in which they were asked about their life experience.

During the break, in-play clips were shown to the audience and afterwards Sky presenter Ian Ward questioned Holding about it, triggering an outpouring so powerful it led to a second interview on Sky News. Under gentle prompts from Mark Austin, a dam broke.

Holding was consumed by emotion as the stuff of life spilled forth. For the first time he was confronting his denial of a thread that was always there, particularly the impact upon his mother of the rejection by her family because her husband’s skin was too dark.

Holding was shocked at the scale of the response, calls from family, friends, colleagues and people he had never met like Thierry Henry, who implored him to keep talking, to use his platform to bring light to an issue too little understood by good people. In short, to make a difference.

He chuckled when I put it to him that, in the best possible sense of the expression, his book might be classified “racism for dummies”.

Its message is disturbing and moving, presented in easily digestible chunks that leaves none in doubt about the tragic plight of people of colour, the atrocities inflicted, the injustices suffered, the pain, anguish and dehumanisation still experienced.

In writing it he was forced to address his own reticence, to reflect on his mother’s experience, the unhappy time he spent living in Miami, the lot of his two daughters and grandchildren domiciled in the US. There was huge discomfort in the horrors uncovered during his many hours of research.

“I didn’t enjoy the research because there was too much pain in it,” Holding tells i. “As I was doing it I was sending some chapters to my family members. One chapter I sent to my sister, and she said ‘Mikey I can’t finish reading it. It is too painful, too hard to read.’ She is 78 years old and could not do it.”

Holding collates in his book the thoughts of some stellar advocates who agreed to collaborate, including Henry, Naomi Osaka, Usain Bolt, Michael Johnson and Hope Powell. The material retraces the story of black oppression from the slave trade to the present, examines the role of education in suppressing the truth, exposes the historiographical bias in the recording of events, the unwitting racism in well-meaning folk. There is hope, but to realise a better future we must first acknowledge the scale of a problem that is manifest today.

When politicians are more concerned with the treatment of sportsmen negotiating past indiscretions rather than the nature and impact of the abusive messaging for which they are responsible; when people boo footballers for taking the knee; when members of parliament liken taking the knee to a Nazi salute; when out-of-work actors dismiss footballers as “millionaire woke babies protesting inequality on two hundred grand a week”, you know there is work to be done.

Holding has no truck with the faux politicos who take offence at Black Lives Matter symbolism. “All who want to talk about the political side of BLM are desperately looking for an excuse not to support it because they don’t want to support it,” Holding says. “I have nothing to do with the organisation. I have no idea who started it, funds it, runs it. I don’t care about the organisation, and that is not me trying to put them down. What I care about is the three words: Black. Lives. Matter. And for people to accept that black lives matter.

“I’m hoping to educate those who want to know, let them understand where this thing is coming from, why it started and what we can do about getting rid of it. I’m not naive enough to think that racism will die. But it can be better and the more people that are educated about the system will make it so.”

Holding cites a Yale University study involving 135 teachers that asked them to identify challenging behaviour in a mixed classroom of schoolkids played by actors. Though there was no challenging behaviour, 42 per cent of the teachers singled out a black child as challenging.

“In their minds they are thinking they are nice, normal people. The circumstances in which they grew up and what they have been taught makes them have racist thoughts without them knowing it. They were embarrassed when they got the results. We have good people out there brought up with these thoughts whose minds have been turned in the wrong directions.”

Holding is essentially addressing the concept of otherness and how to overcome ancient prejudice when confronted by a face of colour.

“The person that is the other can’t overcome it without the help of those who perceive them to be other. That person has to make the other feel as if he or she is just like him or her. This is not a situation that can be solved by one side of the equation. Both sides have to come together.”

Holding grew up in a mixed setting where people learned to rub along and power was shared across the colour spectrum. He sees hope in the behaviour of inner-city kids, adopting the dress codes and speech patterns of black artists, actors and musicians. The unmistakable cadence of Caribbean patois out of the mouths of white youth in London convinces him there is a way forward as long as we create the conditions for unity.

“People imitate because they like what they see. Unconsciously adopting manners and mores comes from mixing, adapting and accepting each other as people, accepting people not as different. This is the Jamaican model. All sorts of cultures mixing to form one people. That’s what we need across the world.”

His argument closes on a truth we would all do well to remember. “Before we are white and black we are Homo sapiens. We are the same species. Whether people want to believe it or not, we all come from one. The human race started in Africa. I hope the book will change people. As a young man growing up I was hiding from racism. I felt I didn’t have to deal with it because when I got back home it wouldn’t mean anything to me. I was deliberately avoiding it. Doing this book I could not evade it anymore. We all have to get here at some point.”

Why We Kneel, How We Rise by Michael Holding (Simon & Schuster UK) is available from 24 June 2021, RRP £20