Colin Kazim-Richards I want people to stop thinking all black people have the same experience and culture - The Athletic

Colin Kazim-Richards I want people to stop thinking all black people have the same experience and culture

May 31, 2021 Before Colin Kazim-Richards had even left school, he had confronted death more times than he cared to count. Early in his life, he lost his younger brother Rodney, who was born with Edwards’ syndrome, a chromosome deficiency. His brother died after just eight months, but such was the severity of his illness it was a miracle Rodney lived even that long. Advertisement “He wasn’t even supposed to breathe,” Kazim-Richards tells The Athletic. “He had no tibia. He had a cleft palate. He couldn’t have lived in this world. I wouldn’t want him to — it’s a cruel world. The quality of life would not have been there for him. But he was powerful. “I had a cousin, Anthony, who was two and half weeks younger than me. We grew up together. He was a year above me in school because of when my birthday is (August 26). He died when he was 16. Heart attack,” Kazim-Richards goes on to explain. “I came down from Bury (his club at the time). He was so clumsy. He broke his leg. He had a triple fracture of his leg. His leg was mash-up. He had, like, scaffold on his leg for, like, a year and a half. He put on a lot of weight. Always breaking his arm and stuff. “I get a call saying he’s been rushed to hospital, and I think he’s just broke his arm. I was seeing him later anyway. I got to the hospital and he had a heart attack. Dead. Then I had a cousin who died in a car crash. He was at Wimbledon, but they let him go. That was it. So he went, then Anthony died of his heart attack. “I lost a cousin, not a blood one but one of them you’re so close with so call them cousins. He was killed by having his drink spiked and having an epileptic fit at home alone. “Then we had Royston, who was the man. He was our protector. He was a bad boy but was really smart. Nobody troubled him. He had a brain haemorrhage and died in the bath at 21. That one really hurt. I was starting to get to know death. I still haven’t dealt with Royston. He was three years older than me. If he told me to sit down, I’d sit down. Then he died and that mashed me up.” The confrontation of such realities meant Kazim-Richards struggled to open up emotionally. Such intense and recurring pain was taking its toll on his psyche. While he was learning to open up once more, he needed another outlet. Advertisement “I started having problems with showing affection to people, because I’m thinking, ‘Everybody I love keeps leaving, man’. The first two years with my wife I was a bastard, I won’t lie to you. I loved her but I’m not going to tell her or show her, so she could leave me. “So the tattoos, it’s so it can never go. Even the Milky Bar Kid one. That’s for my son. These are things that I wanted because they can never leave. The first one I got was because of Anthony, when he died.” Such harsh personal experiences, against a backdrop of deprivation and prejudice, forged a hard exterior. The now-34-year-old led a sheltered existence throughout his childhood. His father, also Rodney, saw it as necessary so he did not get entangled in the “super gangs” of London. “Being born in the ’80s, growing up in the 1990s, back then football and some not-so-legal things were the only way really to make money,” Kazim-Richards explains to The Athletic. “Not even music at the time was life-changing. You had like Kano and So Solid and all them, but now Stormzy is out there. Look at him. It’s life-changing now. But back then, it was football or non-legit hustling.” The Athletic is chatting with Kazim-Richards in The Delicatessen cafe in Allestree, near Derby. Kazim-Richards has just hustled over from the city’s Da Vinci Academy, where he has been helping put on a PE lesson. Dad Rodney accompanies him and the pair both order vanilla lattes. It is a world away from Kazim-Richards’ own school days at Aveling Park Primary in Walthamstow, north-east London. The old building is closed now, and the place has been relocated and renamed the Frederick Bremer School. It was one of the first schools in the UK to have security guards. Kazim-Richards hesitates to describe himself as a bad kid but admits to being suspended a couple of times for one reason or another, and he remembers clashing with teachers who doubted his dreams. Advertisement “I’ll never forget my maths teacher,” he says. “One time, I wasn’t doing my work. I was laughing with my friend and she came over and asked if I really thought I was going to be a footballer. I told her, ‘Yeah’. I told her that with my whole chest. How dare she ask me that? “She said I was going to be stuck there with the rest of them and be nothing. I was 13 and she told me I was going to be nothing. So growing up in that environment, I was giving the middle finger to everybody. If they doubted me, cool. We’ll see.” “Now they’ve got his shirt up on the wall,” his dad adds with a smirk. Who knows exactly when the teacher in question realised she had made an error of judgement. Kazim-Richards’ football journey has always generated headlines and intrigue, such is its breadth. He has played for 17 clubs in eight countries and also 43 times for Turkey’s national teams, including 37 senior caps. He is at ease as he recounts his life story, experiences that moulded him, books he has read and how he unwinds, what becoming a father taught him, and, grimly but inevitably, the racism he has encountered. For Kazim-Richards, little has changed in the way of racism. He simply believes he experiences it now on a more covert level. His first memory of overtly racist abuse came as a 15-year-old at Bury, when he was subjected to merciless hazing. Yet even as recently as last week, he feels he was prey to more covert prejudice when he was pulled over by police while making his way back to his Derby home. “Going up to Bury, I had bananas put on my peg for a while. I had them rubbed on my clothes. I was only 15. That was at the start in pre-season. It could have broken me. It was happening and people would say it was banter. I let it go, then it happened again. It happened all week, because I wasn’t biting. Then I went outside and started smashing up their cars. “What affected me more was they mushed it into my clothes. I’m on £45 a week and my dad bought me the clothes. I needed them clothes. They were, like, second-year or third-year scholars doing it. They all had cars — little boy-racers. I told them if I saw another banana on my peg, I was going to start smashing cars. They didn’t take me seriously. So I went out with a bat and started doing it. They came out and apologised. I still got in trouble, but never mind. “I got stopped the other day in Derby. It’s nonsense. I have my kids and wife in the car. I’m driving down Brian Clough Way. It’s night, I move into another lane because I realise I’m in the wrong one. Policeman stops me. He asks for my licence, asks if the car is mine, asks if the car is insured. I asked if he just couldn’t check that on the number plate. Suddenly he had a problem. He didn’t even give me a reason at first as to why he stopped me. At the end, he said it was for reckless driving. “I asked if he wanted to breathalyse me, because I don’t drink so it doesn’t matter to me. He starts asking when was the last time I ate. He made me wait 15 minutes for the test. When he comes to do the test he doesn’t have any mask or gloves on. He was being a dick, so I started being a dick and asked him to go back and get a facemask and gloves. Test comes back as zero.” And, of course, there was the incident in February when, after a 1-1 draw with arch-rivals Nottingham Forest at Pride Park in which the striker scored a blistering late equaliser, he woke the next morning to find several racist messages had been sent to his Instagram account. His son overheard him reporting the incident and thus Kazim-Richards was forced to explain some heartbreaking realities long before he had planned to do so. “I was on the phone to somebody from the club to let them know what happened. I thought my son was asleep. He comes in asking who called me a n****r and a monkey. I’ve had my son ask me why black people in movies are bad guys. I’ve told them it’s acting and not real, don’t take it seriously. It’s like the conversation you have with your kids about sex. So I had to tell him that no matter in life, you will have some people who see you a certain way. But you are not a problem. Your skin, your hair, it’s beautiful. “A part of my children’s innocence was taken by the perpetrators,” he adds. The subject of race dominated parts of our chat, which spanned two cafes, a car journey and a brief stop-off at Kazim-Richards’ home. The forward was one of the more vocal players when Derby decided to Manager Wayne Rooney held a meeting of the playing and coaching staffs to sound out opinions on the peaceful protest and, if they were to stop kneeling, what else could be done going forwards. A son of first-generation immigrants, Kazim-Richards was shocked to discover how racist England was, considering its history of immigration and how the country was shaped. His kids are a blend of Black, Turkish, Brazilian (through his wife) and Italian. The man himself is steeped in a rich culture — even Irish plantation owners, by way of Antigua in the Caribbean. Grace Farms of Cork, we learn, as Rodney pulls out his phone to show a PDF of the documents of ancestor Amelia Sheridan, complete with the seat number she occupied on the boat over. As Kazim-Richards looks to football and sees incidents crop up frequently, he offers understanding for those who come from a different culture such have been his global experiences. He cites Manchester United counterpart Edinson Cavani’s use of the word “negrito” on an Instagram post in November, which landed the Uruguayan with a three-match ban and a £100,000 fine. For Kazim-Richards, such acts need contextualising. “Some places abroad, they don’t understand what the word ‘n***a’ means. Of course, if a man comes up to you and says, ‘Listen, negro, what are you doing here?’, then that’s different. Edinson did a dumb thing. But contextually, he didn’t mean to be a racist and that does not make him a racist, because where he is from that word is used a lot, along with ‘blanco’, which means ‘little whitey’ in Spanish. I wasn’t offended by what Edinson said. It was dumb. But I didn’t believe it was racism in the way some people tried to spin in. “It takes away from everything that we are trying to do. Now, the context for (a 2011 incident involving Liverpool’s Uruguayan striker Luis) Suarez and (Manchester United full-back Patrice) Evra is different — the way Suarez is saying it. So that’s different. So we need people who are making these decisions to be more educated. Who is in charge of our diversity?” Before Derby’s 1-0 away to Millwall in December, fans allowed to attend during a brief relaxing of COVID-19 restrictions loudly booed when players knelt before kick-off. It became headline news. Even government ministers chipped in with their thoughts on the matter. Column inches and air time were filled, all while Derby, led by Black players Duane Holmes, Andre Wisdom and Kazim-Richards, held an impromptu meeting at half-time to discuss the booing and vowed to win the game — which they did with the only goal on 69 minutes. Kazim-Richards had not taken the knee at the New Den. Instead, he chose to stand with a balled fist in the air as a symbol of black power. In March, Wisdom began doing the same. The striker explained part of his position on Twitter but articulated it further to The Athletic in the comfort of Derby’s Cotton Shed cafe. “Kneeling is a submissive position, man. You will never see me kneel. My team in Mexico stood with me because I didn’t want to kneel. I keep trying to tell people that, from my perspective, is how so many look at all black people and think we all have the same experience. “A black person from Nigeria experiences things differently to a black person from Antigua or Sierra Leone. “Take me, Teden (Mengi, Derby’s on-loan Manchester United defender) and Beni (Baningime, a midfielder on loan from Everton). We’re different. Beni is Congolese. He doesn’t speak French, he speaks Lingala. He was used to shoes and no socks. “We are totally different culturally. I want people to stop thinking all black people have the same experience and culture.” The fire with which he speaks and articulates is the same kind of energy he brings to teaching his children. But away from the pitch and the intense physicality he plays with, there is a softer, warm side that radiates from him. Fatherhood changed Kazim-Richards, even more so when his third child, his only daughter, was born. “What I say to my kids is that nothing can hold them back other than themselves. I think some people use their circumstances to be all ‘woe is me’. But where we lived in Brazil and Mexico, you can see the poverty and the less fortunate. My kids aren’t allowed to say the word ‘starving’, because they have lived in countries where they know what proper poverty and actual starvation looks like. What I say to my kids is the difference between them and another person is opportunity. “When I had my son, he had every pair of Jordans going, because I never had them. I spent so much on him. But with my daughter, I had to change my thinking and see things from her perspective. Even from washing her in the shower. For me, it was a bit weird. Being in the bath with my daughter, I used to keep my boxers on and stuff. It made me way more emotional. I’ll tear up at films now. It’s mad. Having a daughter made me become a better man. “Every Friday is daddy-and-daughter day. I’m taking her to get her nails done as it’s the first time she’s had the chance to get them done since the pandemic. I sling her bright-pink unicorn backpack over my shoulder and walk hand in hand with my daughter.” Our time is nearly over. We’ve canvased the latest books Kazim-Richards has read (he recently finished a book of Bob Marley quotes and is now reading up on Rastafarianism), films he enjoys (mainly foreign ones, and he is lucky enough to be able to watch most of them without subtitles) and what video games he plays. Answer? None. “I don’t do anything I’m not good at,” he laughs. He kindly offers to give The Athletic a ride home. But before we part ways he offers one more nugget of wisdom, which he’s acquired from all his battles, globe-trotting, goals, trophies, life experience, grief, prejudice, fatherhood, and more. “I’m just a normal guy, man.”

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