THE shocking level of racism within youth soccer in Northern Ireland has been exposed by a new short film entitled ‘Where you really from?’
A 14-year-old boy labelled ‘Taliban’ over a weekend away. By his coach. Who shouted out ‘He’s got a bomb!’ while the player sat on a plane.
A 10-year-old girl called the ‘n-word’ by an even younger opposing player.
A mixed race boy abused by watching parents, who were then surprised to be challenged by his (white) dad who was also on the sidelines.
These are among the incidents highlighted in the superb production of ‘WYRF?’ by Cameron Tharma and Charlie Rollins, both from Holywood.
One of the film’s interviewees, Aaron Ellis John Brown, who has a mum of Jamaican extraction, told The Irish News that being racially abused is “like someone sticking a knife in your ears. It’s really hard to hear, especially when someone comes with so much aggression behind it, so much intention. You think ‘That person really meant that’.”
Rosie Zubier, who has a Sudanese dad, relating that incident when called a ‘n*gger’ by a young boy, said: “I remember at first I didn’t know if I heard him right, I was thinking ‘Has he actually just said that?!’ He would have been nine or 10. I wondered ‘Has he just said that or am I just thinking that?’
“I realised that he did say it, and he said it in the right context, which also made me think ‘What is he hearing at home?!’
“It was anger with me, that the only thing he could think of attacking was my ethnicity. That set me back a bit. If one of my team-mates had made him that angry he’d just have called them a ‘bitch’, or something like that.
Cameron’s younger brother Ross, whose dad is Malaysian of Sri Lankan heritage, was the subject of the vile ‘Taliban’ taunts. Ross remembered: “It was nervous laughter at first, from everyone. Then it kept going all weekend.
“Team-mates are coming up to you, going ‘That’s not all right, this is out of hand’. But you don’t really know what to do when it’s someone with that much authority and you’re 14-year-olds. It’s difficult. You don’t really know how you can deal with it without affecting yourself.”
- Kenny Archer talks to the film-makers, and relates the experiences of Ross Tharma, in the first of a two-part examination of the issue.
