As part of Everton’s coverage of October’s UK Black History Month, Earl Barrett spoke to evertonfc.com about encountering racism in his young life, employing those experiences to aid the push for equality, why he is still ‘looking over my shoulder every day’, progress in football and society, and the distance still to cover before a centuries-old problem is overcome.

This interview was originally published in the matchday programme for Saturday's meeting with Watford.

The racist venomously spat out his abuse, a relentless, pejorative diatribe. Earl Barrett felt like he was marching headfirst into a hail of bullets.

And how would most people react should they find themselves unexpectedly under siege? Flee for cover.

In Barrett’s case, that meant turning on his heels and running home and bursting into tears.

“But I didn’t tell anyone,” says Barrett.

He is reliving an episode that is nearly 40 years old but the memory exists in high definition.

The irony, confides Barrett, is that the racist – “He was absolutely hurling abuse, ‘You black this, f this and f that, get back to your country’, it was like machine-gun fire” – was eating in an Indian restaurant.

“He started as soon as I opened the door. I didn’t step inside,” says Barrett.

Barrett instinctively suppressed his anger and upset.

He was subjected to three major incidents of racism in his young life and didn’t utter a word about any of them.

To speak up after a dreadful experience playing for Manchester City’s reserve team, he says, would have been tantamount to drawing a line under a burgeoning professional football career.

Barrett is keen, then, that we acknowledge some notable steps forward in the intervening decades.

But for a view of the road left to travel, take a moment to consider that Barrett, a highly-qualified coach and former Premier League and England footballer, is working in the USA because every avenue of hope in this country finished in a “dead end”.

The Football Association’s equality, diversion and inclusion strategy for 2021-24, released this month, specifies a number of targets designed to increase diversity in its workforce.

It wants people from black, Asian, mixed and other ethnic backgrounds filling 25 per cent of coaching positions with England men’s teams by the end of 2024. The current figure is 20 per cent.

Another goal is for the same group to occupy 13 per cent of FA leadership roles – an increase of five per cent.

“There is change,” says Barrett.

“But it is primarily happening below ground and the changes need to be visible to the next generation of people of colour.

“It would be great for them to consistently see people of different colours working as technical directors and managing directors and on boards.

“The danger now is when young people look for inspiration from somebody who looks or talks like them, they can’t see it.”

Barrett, a fast and adhesive defender who was an excellent reader of the game, played 83 times in three years with Everton after signing in January 1995.

He studied for a degree in sports science following an injury-enforced retirement around the turn of the century and subsequently secured his UEFA A Licence and the University of Warwick’s Certificate in Football Management.

Barrett relocated to Houston in 2016 for a post as director of coaching at Rise Soccer Club after seven years working in Stoke City’s academy.

“I have been for jobs in the UK and felt really hopeful, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘Look at my environment, look at my audience, I don’t reflect that’,” says Barrett.

“And, inevitably, I didn’t get the job.

“It’s kind of depressing. You’re upset but you must carry on.

“There can’t be a time when I say, ‘What’s the point?’.

“Yes, I feel more comfortable in the States. But, maybe, in a few years, I’ll return to the UK and look for a job and the audience will be different.

“And if I don’t get the job, I won’t be thinking, ‘Same old’. It’ll be, ‘That person was better than me’.

“Culture, race, disability… none of it should matter.

“The process should reflect a game of football: 22 people going at it and whichever team is strongest and has the best tactics and is technically better, wins the match.

“It should be solely about the ability and skill for the job.

“If we get to that stage, things will have changed.”

Barrett uses the term “hit and miss” to describe the experience of growing up in birthplace Rochdale as a black male.

He started life with his parents and older brother in a one-bedroom flat that contained “everything we owned”. 

“We didn’t have much money but it was fun,” says Barrett.

His friendship group was cosmopolitan and Barrett reached 13 before encountering any form of racism.

“We had moved to a two-up, two-down terraced house by then,” says Barrett. “I was walking back from playing football in the field and was about 100 yards from my house when a white guy walked past and said, ‘You black b******’.

“I was confused. ‘What happened there? What did I do? ‘What the hell was that?’

“I ran home and didn’t say anything to anybody.

“Crying and being upset was my way of dealing with an incident, then I’d brush it away and carry on.”

Barrett’s mother died when he was 11 and, from then, “dad just wanted to protect us from everything”.

The topics of race and equality, therefore, were off the table.

“We’d see the news but never speak about it,” says Barrett.

“I have three daughters and we do talk about racism and diversity and being comfortable with who you are but the world is a different place.

“When I was growing up, you had to get on with it.”

That sense of feeling duty-bound to turn the other cheek, to “zip it”, in Barrett’s words, accompanied the footballer through his teens and early adulthood.

He would “hear comments” playing Sunday league – “Black this , black that, the N-word” – but it was a game for City’s second string in a first-team stadium, populated by 200-odd people, that crystallised Barrett’s predicament.

He’s previously related the story in these pages but it bears repeating.

“As soon as I got on the ball,” he says, “the monkey chants began and bananas were thrown on the field.

“This went on for the whole game.”

Entering the dressing room post-match, Barrett was met by deafening silence.

“Nobody said a word,” he continues.

“My reading of the situation was, if I said something, I was the troublemaker and would be kicked out the game.

“At that time, football wasn’t equipped to deal with it, not players, nor coaches.

“I had been in similar situations so knew what I had to do: zip it.”

Barrett is confident football would have been prepared to listen by the time he was a senior player in the 1990s.

He likens bygone attitudes to today’s elite men’s game grappling with the subject of homosexuality.

“There is progress in terms of attitude towards homosexuality, I think,” says Barrett, “but maybe the environment is not ready for somebody to say they are gay.

“At the start of my time in professional football, my audience wasn’t ready for me to speak about what happened. You looked around for support and it wasn’t there.

“I have heard from a player who spoke out about derogatory comments from his manager around that time (early-mid 1980s) and that was him done in the professional game.

“So, it was right for me to keep quiet.

“It was a selfish act but I wanted football to work for me.”

The racist events suffered by Barrett caused changing, internal emotions.

Fear was replaced by upset, which gave way to resignation.

The presumption is that those feelings buried one on top of another would have created an enormous weight to carry around.

“That should have been the case but it wasn’t,” says Barrett.

“It made me stronger and want to be involved in anti-racism campaigns.

“It didn’t debilitate me [pauses]… I don’t think it did.

“But after those moments, everywhere I went, I was looking over my shoulder. I am, even to this day.

“The feeling is, ‘This is what I do, how I must live, because of the environment I grew up in and what might be out there’.

“I don’t think the colour of my skin held me back as a player but there were differences in how I was treated in certain situations.

“The looks you receive walking into a shop in the UK, even as a professional footballer… people were screaming out to me, ‘You are different and I have my eye on you’.

“It is how they act, you can’t hide it.

“It made me stronger in two ways: ‘I am going to be something and I am not going to be like you’.”

Barrett played a handful of games for Manchester City but began his career in earnest as part of Joe Royle’s daredevil Oldham Athletic team that won promotion into the top-flight in 1991.

The following season he moved to Aston Villa, where he was a member of the side that thrillingly won the 1994 League Cup final to thwart Manchester United’s domestic treble bid.

Barrett was the 18th black player to represent England when he won the first of three caps in 1991. In June this year, Everton defender Ben Godfrey became the 100th player from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background to wear the Three Lions.

Viv Anderson broke the mould in 1978 and Barrett namechecks the former Nottingham Forest and Arsenal defender as a precious beacon of light.

Another source of inspiration was Paul Canoville, the first black player for Chelsea, whose book, Black and Blue, unsparingly recounted the fearsome racist invective that scarred a fleeting career at the top of football.

“I used to watch those games and be horrified, absolutely horrified, at his own fans booing him,” says Barrett.

“It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in my life.

“But it gave me the strength to think, ‘That’s not right. I am going to play and show people what I am about’.

“Paul won’t know but he had an impact on me.

“Those people shouting at him because of the colour of his skin drove my desire to be someone.

“It made me want to be stronger and better and improve myself and be something in the world.”

Barrett’s increasing comfort speaking openly on race while a player led to a patron’s role with anti-racism education charity Show Racism the Red Card.

For two years from 2010, he was Mentoring and Leadership Project Manager for Kick It Out [KIO], football’s equality and inclusion campaign.

The KIO role focused on increasing minority groups’ access to the football industry and Barrett speaks ardently about advances achieved through the organisation’s annual Raise Your Game conference, attended by scores of senior figures from across the sport.

“I loved working for Kick It Out and what we were able to achieve,” says Barrett.

“The only frustration was a common misconception over the organisation’s remit.

“KIO is a campaign and has no power to introduce policies.

“They aim to create awareness of issues of race and equality and opportunity.

“We were making headway and there has been further progress. But it is going to take a really long time for things to be equal.”

Barrett related over WhatsApp days after this interview the story of America’s MLS NEXT competition – for players aged 12-19 – introducing measures to curb a rise in discriminatory on-field language.

It is a bleak development, particularly in light of the accelerated movement for equality and racial justice following the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis last year.

Barrett has detected minimal societal change in the 17 months since Floyd’s killing, which was “an eye opener, not in the sense I couldn’t believe it but the disregard for somebody else’s life I saw on the face of that police officer”.

Barrett continues: “I still see and hear of incidents happening purely on the basis of ‘You are white and I am black’.

“And you think, ‘Really, did you not see George Floyd?’

“Globally, it is a slow process.

“But the more people from various walks of life and different areas of inequality speak out, the more it will change.

“If you don’t understand how I am feeling, how can you put yourself in a place that will give you empathy?”

Barrett sees seven black managers in England’s top four divisions and says, ‘there has to be more”.

He was perplexed by the near five years required to convict a police officer of the unlawful killing of his former Aston Villa teammate and close friend Dalian Atkinson in 2016.

There is dismay, too, over the lack of diversity among those responsible for administering measly sanctions for racist and discriminatory behaviour in football.

These are examples, insists Barrett, of sport and society dragging their heels.

But, he agrees, he would not have been asked even a decade ago why he is proud of his heritage.

The question is born of the ‘Proud to Be’ theme of October’s UK Black History Month.

“I am proud to be me, not because I am black, but because I am me,” says Barrett.

“I want young people to know they can be themselves and be successful, whatever race or colour or culture or creed, if they work hard and are true to themselves and understand other cultures and creeds and inequalities.

“People of colour have a massive imprint on young people.

“Wherever we go, we leave something behind, so make it positive.

“Then other people of that colour or inequality can say, ‘He did it and look how successful he is, we can do it as well’.”

Earl Barrett is fighting back and we should all hope he finishes on the winning team.