There’s a race row going on within the South Africa national cricket team—and it’s made some international headlines, so you know which way the criticism is flowing.
Officials say there has been some “concern” regarding the racial make-up of the 2024 T20 World Cup squad. Just one of the 15 players is black, while nine are white.
There has, of course, been much less mention of the fact the squad is also made up of five mixed-race or Asian-origin players.
France24 highlighted, in what reads as a particularly disapproving tone, that “not since 2016 … has a South African squad for an International Cricket Council event been so dominated by whites” (emphasis added). It is (thankfully) hard to imagine a publication criticising a sports team—or any other grouping, for that matter—for being “so dominated by blacks,” at least without it drawing vast swathes of condemnation.
Pholetsi Moseki, the cricket team’s chief executive, said there were “cricket reasons” for the cricket squad’s racial balance.
Coach Rob Walter added, after being “asked to explain the white-dominated racial make-up” of the squad(!), that “my number one imperative is to create a winning … team. In order to do that I have to pick the best team that has the best chance of doing that.”
Walter went on to say:
The system needs to really up the ante so that in six months, 12 months or in two years’ time … the demographics and representation in our team starts to look a bit different.
Translation: “our team starts to look a bit less white.”
SA’s team does actually have racial quotas in place at a domestic level, mandating that there are at least three black players in a starting team. Moseki stressed that these quotas remain in place.
Jonathan Witt, who is managing editor at The Overton Press digital publication, reported last year that these very quotas mean the team is “forced to field a team of 10 players instead of 11 if a player of color is injured/absent and you only have white players in replacement.”
Witt dismissed this as “the end result of ‘equity.’”
