Paul Lewis: There is no clear path to a racism-free society

England women's football manager Mark Sampson has come under scrutiny after making controversial comments towards two of his players. Photo / Getty Images.

Comedian Lenny Henry once told of noticing a black guardsman on duty at Buckingham Palace. Just the one, mind, and Henry said: "Shows how far we've come - a black guy standing outside the Queen's place with a loaded gun and he hasn't been arrested."

Funny, right? But racist, no? Henry is black; his ex-wife, comedian Dawn French, last month revealed the pair were subjected to abuse and attacks (including an attempt to burn their house down) for no reason other than being a mixed-race couple.

Henry can get away with his Buckingham Palace joke partly because he too is black - which brings us to the even more complex element of racism in sport.

Italian football this week distinguished itself by forcing fans up and down the country to listen to excerpts from Anne Frank's Diary before matches after fans from Serie A club Lazio made anti-Semitic references to Roma fans, sticking up posters picturing Frank as a Roma supporter. Lazio players wore T-shirts decrying anti-Semitism.

In the UK, former England women's football team manager Mark Sampson was at the centre of controversy after two team members of colour complained he had asked one how many times she had been arrested; the other maintained Sampson had told her to ensure her Nigerian relatives didn't bring the Ebola virus when they attended a game.

Sampson was fired for reasons other than racial but the common thread running through Lenny Henry and the Lazio/Sampson sagas is humour.

It was a joke, said Lazio fans - why is the world upset when the other guys say the same sort of things about us? At an inquiry into the Sampson incident, barrister and inquiry head Katharine Newton said: "I consider that in making the comment to [the player], [Sampson] did treat her less favourably than he would have treated a player who was not of African descent. He had therefore subjected her to less favourable treatment because of her ethnicity. As a matter of law it was a racially discriminatory comment ... It is important to state this is not a finding he is racist."

Elsewhere, executives of the Football Association were grilled by a parliamentary committee after it was alleged the FA attempted to withhold a payment (they denied it but later paid up) to one of Sampson's players until she had written a letter clearing the FA of institutional racism.

Sampson's remarks were, the inquiry heard, a limp attempt at humour. Sad, maybe, but there is no doubt many outside sport do not realise the amount of genuine banter between different racial groups.

I played rugby in this country and overseas for many years and can absolutely attest that inter-racial banter of the sort that would sound direly racist to unprepared ears was commonplace between players on the same team; 99.9 per cent of the time it was not meant nor taken seriously.

Times have changed and awareness of the perils of such things is much higher. Yet rugby in this country also spawned recent incidents when two Fijian players were racially abused - one by an opponent in a game after which he was originally banned for a stinging 46 weeks, the other by spectators.

At an overseas club where I played and coached, teams regularly had four different ethnic groups involved. The banter was almost identical to that in New Zealand - and yet, when new to the club, I was approached by two threatening white players who called me "a black ****".

I told them they'd got it a bit wrong; I was Jewish. It was fun watching their faces as they mentally re-arranged their prejudices.

There is no clear path to a racism-free society, especially when not everything that sounds racist is intended to be and when legal inquiries can find that someone making discriminatory statements is not a racist.

The Italians' tactic of forced liberalism by reading Anne Frank to the masses is also not the way. That risks hardening entrenched attitudes. The Lazio "ultra" supporters boycotted the readings; reports later said a minority made Nazi salutes and sang fascist songs.

If sport's rank and file need to understand the difference between banter and brutish racial references in public, so sports bodies must ensure they are not perceived as paying lip service.

Italian Football Federation president Carlo Tavecchio lamented Lazio's "unqualifiable behaviour offending a community and our whole country". This is the same bloke who won the presidency in spite of, in 2014, talking about "banana eaters" playing in Italy.

In dealing with hard core racists, the tacit message from the top should not be that it's alright to have certain attitudes as long as you are seen to do the right thing. Racists recognise hypocrisy, same as anyone else.

The FA were diminished by being accused of paying "hush money" to a player if they absolved them of institutional racism. That, too, sends the wrong message.

Sport has already done much to salve racist attitudes but only the self-deceiving would maintain all is well. A long and consistent demonstration of the way to live with, and think about, race will change attitudes and casual racism - but the commitment at the top has to be genuine and transparent.