John Yems- The Unconscious Racist
Joe Marshall- @AllSportJoe
For a while now, I’ve been keen on the idea of writing a blog about Crawley Town. I plan to have a deep dive into the crypto chaos that has engulfed the Red Devils since the shambolic WAGMI United takeover last spring. However, before I could get my teeth into that particular situation, another one has landed on the doorstep of English football’s house of shame.
Broadfield, Crawley. Credit, Sussex World
John Yems was appointed Crawley Town head coach on 5th December 2019, and despite the pandemic curtailing that particular season, did fairly well in the early months of his tenure. When the curtain was finally drawn on the 2019-20 campaign, Crawley finished 13th, and Yems was to remain in charge.
Personally, the very existence of John Yems continued to pass me by. Not a consistent follower of League 2, I wasn’t really made aware of his presence until a couple of years later, when some of his post match interviews went viral for Yems’, unique responses to perfectly reasonable questions.
When the 63 year old snappily replied “do what you want” to a perfectly reasonable question about generating an atmosphere, I felt slightly disconnected from the rest of the internet. When my instinct was to recoil and cringe, rather than whoop and cheer for the rebirth of the ‘proper football man,’ I felt like a confused anomaly. Instead of celebrating someone who ‘says it like it is’, I found myself part of a small camp of rational people, who saw it for what it was: bullying. Rather than join in with the ubiquitous groupthink of the Twitter banter accounts, alarm bells began to sound.
Yems assesses the Hartlepool defeat in his style.
One snappy, throwaway comment after a last minute defeat however, is probably not the best way to fully judge a person’s character, so maybe it was a little harsh of me to write the guy off as a complete tool based off my first snapshot of the man. However, since then, further snippets of Yems’ personality have come to grim light.
The timeline of this light has gone a little bit like this; April 23rd 2022, Yems is suspended by Crawley due to ‘serious and credible accusations’ regarding racial discrimination. May 6th 2022, Yems and Crawley part ways. 28th July 2022, Yems is charged by the FA for racial discrimination, with no fewer than SIXTEEN inappropriate comments. November 2022, a tribunal takes place regarding those 16 comments. Now, we arrive in January 2023, and an FA commission report has been released with some truly shocking findings. Shocking for multiple reasons…
The first reason was the nature of the comments that Yems made. For avoidance of doubt, here is a idea of what was said:
-Described Muslim players as “terrorists”
-Deliberately mispronounced the surname of Arnold Schwarzenegger to make it sound like a racial slur
-Asked a black player of African origin if he liked Jerk Chicken (a Carribbean dish, by the way)
-Told Muslim players that they blow stuff up with vests
-Said an Iraqi youth player at the club that he would “probably blow up the stadium.”
-Called a player a “curry muncher”
-Made a comment about “how dark his skin is” after spending time away on international duty for Grenada.
-Made reference to using blow pipes when two black players were playing darts.
Any reasonable person reading these comments would quite rightly be appalled, and when it became apparent that these are the comments that the report found he had made, there was a huge level of outrage.
The 63 year-old received an 18-month ban from football for these offences, however, further disquiet came from the way the report framed Yems as a person, who in the words of the FA commission, is “not a conscious racist.” Taking the comments in isolation, this analysis seems completely at odds to the serious and disgraceful things that Yems.
This is a point that I want to dwell on for a little longer, as terminology often gets disregarded when dealing with matters of anti-racism. Surely racism is racism? There has been a lot of talk in recent years regarding conscious and unconscious bias. Bias of a conscious nature is overt and blatantly discriminatory, for an example, an employer may choose one identical CV over another, simply due to the surname on the top. Unconscious bias can be a little more subtle, and the perpetrator may not realise where stereotypes are negatively impacting upon their assumptions. Case in point, someone might see the title ‘Dr.’ and presume they will soon be talking to a man, and then much to their surprise, a woman arrives.
Where this terminology becomes important with the Yems case is when you see these examples and compare them to the comments that the ex-Crawley boss made. Surely nobody could claim that desperately squeezing in a racial slur by deliberately mispronouncing the surname of Arnold Schwarzenegger is an act of somebody who is not consciously racist? To do that, you have to consciously go out of your way.
Once the linguistic analytics have been completed, and even if you are able to make peace with the idea that these comments were genuinely a product of misplaced banter, lingering around from the good ol’ days, the FA commission have done such a beautifully embarrassing job of undermining the organisation they work for. How can the FA continue to even attempt to push forward their messages of inclusion and anti-discrimination, if those chosen to represent it are so steadfastly calm in their conclusion that some racism (despite being so overtly conscious) can be classed as unconscious. In handing out an 18 month ban, and accompanying it with this side order of a feeble explanation, it almost tells the public that the punishment isn’t quite as severe as it would’ve been if Yems wore a pointy white hat on the touchline. It gives the impression, that actually, there is a sliding scale of racism, a scale dictated by everyone other than the individuals actually affected. It appears irrelevant how the recipient of the abuse been affected, and the FA will punish the offender simply based on where on the scale they deem the abuse to fit.
The FA have correctly stepped in, and are now said to be considering their legal options in terms of getting the ban extended, having publicly declared that they disagree with the panel’s findings.
I was going to end this blog here, but inexplicably, Yems spoke to Jim White on TalkSport recently, and rather than offer any semblance of a public apology, he appeared to bizarrely double down, almost insinuating that he is the one who has been hard done by, by losing out on future prospects. After all, guiding Crawley Town to 13th, 12th and 12th again in League Two would surely have had Man City sniffing round when Pep decides to leave. It was an utterly bewildering interview which ticked all of the racism-denial boxes. Yems referenced how he’s “worked with black players, Asian players…” (the football equivalent of not being racist on account of having black friends) and gave a nod to things you “can’t say nowadays.” He then went on to infer that the victims made false allegations because he released them! When I saw that John Yems had done the interview, I was initially a little bit bemused that TalkSport were giving him air time, but I understand that free speech is important, and he’s entitled to come out and said whatever he felt he needs to say. It turned out that all TalkSport did was gave him just enough rope…
I’ve seen many opinions about this whole scenario, many people agreeing that it proves that anti-racism in England is making little-to-no progress. While I agree that at the top level of government and large organisations, this might be the case, it has been refresing to witness the almost universal agreement at at public level, that what Yems did was unacceptable. In addition, the consensus also appears to be that the FA commission completely misjudged the time period of the ban. 18 months is utterly pathetic, and although he won’t get another job again, it doesn’t go far enough to demonstrate how seriously racism should be taken. The FA commission have dropped the ball massively on this one, so fully expect this case to be back in our news cycle in the near future.
