Cricket, Englishness and Racial Thinking

In: The political quarterly, Band 93, Heft 1, S. 95-103

Abstract

AbstractDuring 2021, long‐standing concerns about racism in English cricket rose to the surface to become very public, political questions. For the purposes of clarity, this article begins by drawing a distinction between racism on the one hand and 'racial thinking' on the other. It suggests that racial thinking is related to, but analytically distinct from, and in fact prior to racism. It then goes on to develop a wider analysis of the historical connections between cricket, Englishness and racial thinking. With this in mind, the final section of the article draws on the preceding historical analysis to explore some of the more recent examples of racial thinking in cricket, and their implications for how we might approach the problem of racism in English cricket today.