could feel people respond to me as a young black man, instead of a cute little black kid. The subtle shift in the body language of strangers was something I never discussed with my parents, my sisters, or even Mats. But it was lucky for me that this deepening racial awareness happened at the same time I joined GAIS. While I was beginning to sense the ways that I didn’t fully belong to Swedish society as a whole, I had found a place and a group of people with whom I felt very much at home.
A FTER PRACTICE , my teammates and I usually walked over to McDonald’s, which was still relatively new in our city, and gorged on junk food. We were fascinated by how American it all seemed. Some of my school friends had gotten part-time jobs working the grill and fryers, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I decided I wanted to work at McDonald’s, too. Why not get paid to be where I was hanging out every day anyway?
One day before practice, I went in and asked for an application. When I had finished it, the kid behind the counter pointed me in the direction of his manager, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. I handed over my form, smiling and standing up straight the way my mother had taught me.
The manager held my application like something he’d picked up off the floor, touching it with only his thumb and his index finger.
“I’ll let you know,” he said.
I knew then and there I was not going to get a call. He hadn’t actually said anything racist, but I ricocheted, as I so often did in those teenage years, between trusting my gut and being afraid that I’d misread the entire situation. I walked out of the restaurant, not sure whether I wanted to cry or hit someone.
At practice the next day, when I told my teammates what had happened, they laughed. They thought the very notion of me, ablack kid, applying to work at a place like McDonald’s was hysterical.
“You applied
where
?” my teammates asked, incredulous.
“Of course you didn’t get a job!” they said. “Have you ever seen a
blatte
behind a McDonald’s counter?”
At home, when I told my mother about the way the manager treated me, she did what mothers do: She offered to fight my battles for me. “I’ll call him right now,” she said. “He can’t get away with that kind of treatment.”
“No, no, please,” I insisted. “I’ll work somewhere else. I’ll work somewhere better.”
“Bry dig inte om honom,”
my father said. Ignore them.
Soccer, then, became not only a beloved sport, but GAIS, with its
blatte
crew, became a reprieve from what felt like an increasingly white world. Everything about GAIS was a perfect fit for me, from the sense of identity it gave to the green-and-black-striped jersey that earned us the nickname “the Mackerels.” I wore that jersey, and that nickname, with an unbelievable amount of pride. I like to tell people that my hometown, Göteborg or Gburg, is like Pittsburgh by the sea. For me, wearing that jersey was like being on the kid’s version of the Steelers: It said I belonged in Gburg, even if my skin said I didn’t.
Shortly after Mats and I joined, the adult GAIS division signed its first black player, a Tunisian midfielder named Samir Bakaou. Bakaou was not olive-skinned, like so many North Africans; he was as black as I was and he made a point, whenever our paths would cross, of acknowledging me. He was a cool dude, never stressed on the field, always in control. The only other black males I ever saw were on TV—Carl Lewis, Michael Jackson, Desmond Tutu. They were all so far away. But Samir Bakaou trained where we trained. We didn’t speak the same languages—I spoke Swedish and English, he spoke Arabic and French—but he always nodded his head or winked at me, gestures that assured me that we were connected. Along with Pelé, Bakaou immediately joined the pantheon of my black male role models.
The Mackerels were good, better than good. We traveled all over Northern Europe during the
A FTER PRACTICE , my teammates and I usually walked over to McDonald’s, which was still relatively new in our city, and gorged on junk food. We were fascinated by how American it all seemed. Some of my school friends had gotten part-time jobs working the grill and fryers, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I decided I wanted to work at McDonald’s, too. Why not get paid to be where I was hanging out every day anyway?
One day before practice, I went in and asked for an application. When I had finished it, the kid behind the counter pointed me in the direction of his manager, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. I handed over my form, smiling and standing up straight the way my mother had taught me.
The manager held my application like something he’d picked up off the floor, touching it with only his thumb and his index finger.
“I’ll let you know,” he said.
I knew then and there I was not going to get a call. He hadn’t actually said anything racist, but I ricocheted, as I so often did in those teenage years, between trusting my gut and being afraid that I’d misread the entire situation. I walked out of the restaurant, not sure whether I wanted to cry or hit someone.
At practice the next day, when I told my teammates what had happened, they laughed. They thought the very notion of me, ablack kid, applying to work at a place like McDonald’s was hysterical.
“You applied
where
?” my teammates asked, incredulous.
“Of course you didn’t get a job!” they said. “Have you ever seen a
blatte
behind a McDonald’s counter?”
At home, when I told my mother about the way the manager treated me, she did what mothers do: She offered to fight my battles for me. “I’ll call him right now,” she said. “He can’t get away with that kind of treatment.”
“No, no, please,” I insisted. “I’ll work somewhere else. I’ll work somewhere better.”
“Bry dig inte om honom,”
my father said. Ignore them.
Soccer, then, became not only a beloved sport, but GAIS, with its
blatte
crew, became a reprieve from what felt like an increasingly white world. Everything about GAIS was a perfect fit for me, from the sense of identity it gave to the green-and-black-striped jersey that earned us the nickname “the Mackerels.” I wore that jersey, and that nickname, with an unbelievable amount of pride. I like to tell people that my hometown, Göteborg or Gburg, is like Pittsburgh by the sea. For me, wearing that jersey was like being on the kid’s version of the Steelers: It said I belonged in Gburg, even if my skin said I didn’t.
Shortly after Mats and I joined, the adult GAIS division signed its first black player, a Tunisian midfielder named Samir Bakaou. Bakaou was not olive-skinned, like so many North Africans; he was as black as I was and he made a point, whenever our paths would cross, of acknowledging me. He was a cool dude, never stressed on the field, always in control. The only other black males I ever saw were on TV—Carl Lewis, Michael Jackson, Desmond Tutu. They were all so far away. But Samir Bakaou trained where we trained. We didn’t speak the same languages—I spoke Swedish and English, he spoke Arabic and French—but he always nodded his head or winked at me, gestures that assured me that we were connected. Along with Pelé, Bakaou immediately joined the pantheon of my black male role models.
The Mackerels were good, better than good. We traveled all over Northern Europe during the
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