Jess Carter & Football’s Reckoning with Antiblack Racism

A comment piece by Paula Akpan prompted by the racist abuse directed at Jess Carter during the tournament. It opens in Basel with the celebrations, Sarina Wiegman’s shrieks, Hannah Hampton’s hands atop her head and Chloe Kelly seizing a reporter’s microphone to belt out “Sweet Caroline”, and with Ian Wright pausing to praise Carter’s character after what he called a terrible week for her. Akpan cites Sky Sports data showing Carter named in almost 10% of the 10,110 posts scanned during one match, nearly double the next most-mentioned player, Lucy Bronze, but with the sentiment overwhelmingly negative where Bronze’s was positive. Her argument is that treating football as a bubble above politics allows such abuse to be framed as an outlier rather than a continuation, and she sets Keir Starmer’s condemnation of racism against his own “island of strangers” remark.