When was the last time you sat down and had a heart-to-heart with yourself and really, examined your heart? This may mean admitting we have made a mistake, an error, a poor choice or a bad decision. We make mistakes because we are human. According to Iyanla Vanzant, when we acknowledge our errors and face up to our shortcomings, no one can use them against us.
White privilege is a political and socio-economic system. The global sports ecosystem and industry is West European dominated. Unquestioned white privilege influences systemic decisions.
Devoid of indigenous history, the colonial education syllabus taught by the Caribbean school system colonised our minds and engrained a sense of inferiority.
We are prisoners of the legacy of exploitation and systemic inequality and indifference of the planter class and ruling elite to the poor.
Lloyd Best’s concept of the plantation economy paradigm provides an insight into the reality of the slave and indentured labourers-based economies created by the Colonial powers that left the colonised Third World independent but underdeveloped.
The lack of analysis about the negative impact of the plantation economy on governance and government is at the expense of understanding why we continue to be underdeveloped.
Any manifesto of reclaiming and rebuilding from “rock bottom” Trinidad and Tobago football should be the subject of critical analysis. Don’t be fooled by the contrived animosity, angst, tension and acrimony. It is not a surprise the recent walk back by some T&T Football Association (TTFA) members when reminded of the Bureau of FIFA council authority in the face of what the world governing body for football called the TTFA’s urgent and complex challenges. The dangerous lie which underpinned the Coup d’Etat of FIFA’s power of intervention on the TTFA back in March 2020 was welcomed with open arms. Didn’t those stakeholders know that FIFA alone would determine when it was safe to return the sport to the national football Association?
That there appears to be a fundamental lack of understanding of FIFA’s history and its operating environment should be of significant concern for those who have the legitimate expectation that T&T football will emerge from the FIFA normalisation phase before March 2024. There is the old adage that those who don’t learn the lessons of history will continue to make the same mistakes.
Rumours can make you hate innocent people and love hypocrites.
Nothing in FIFA’s history since 1904 suggests it intends to unlearn its white supremacy and privilege. Consider this line in Abhijit Naskar’s satirical sonnet: “World domination is the ultimate white privilege”.
FIFA is a master at weaponising the principle of autonomy of sport to wield its private power at the expense of public interest.
Bob Marley sang: “I wanna love you and treat you right.” For those who say they love T&T football and “wanna treat it right”, the first task is having a heart-to-heart with yourself.
Marcus Garvey once said “if you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life”.
Iyanla Vanzant summed it up this way when she wrote: “With confidence, you have won even before you started”.
A history of oppression, denial, injustice and abuse has been the greatest detriment and deterrent to people of colour. We have listened so long to what we cannot do, that we have very little confidence in what we can do.
Take a day to heal from the lies you’ve told yourself and the ones that have been told to you, as Maya Angelou, the American poet and civil rights activist advised.
