English when they were winning, Black when they came up short in the penalty shoot out.
Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford received a crash course in the fickle nature of English society as the country lost on penalties in Sunday’s European Championship Final.
As you’ll probably know already, all three were targeted with racist abuse in the hours afterwards.
Even though Rashford had probably campaigned to feed some of his abusers’ kids. Even though many of those hurling insults had lambasted England boss Gareth Southgate earlier in the tournament for not playing Sancho.
And even though 19-year-old Saka had played a key role in beating Denmark last Wednesday night to set up England’s first major tournament final in five and a half decades.
If you are older and you’re Black or Brown, you’ll have known how this works for years before now. You’re only really accepted while you’re useful, if you serve a purpose.
If you can sing, dance, make the optics look good, win a gold medal, excel at sports or crack jokes, pull up a chair. Make yourself at home. If not? Sorry.
It brings to mind the case of Mamoudou Gassama, an immigrant born in Mali who, while living in France, climbed four stories of a block of flats in 30 seconds to save a four-year-old boy hanging from a balcony. Seven months later he was “rewarded” with French citizenship by president Emmanuel Macron.
Last month 27-year-old Senegalese migrant Mouhammad Diouf - who arrived in Spain four years ago after a 20-month journey - jumped into a river to save a 72-year-old man’s life.
After the video of the rescue went viral, a request was made to “reward” his courageous act with legal permission to stay in Spain.
It followed that familiar, yet tiresome narrative of the ‘good immigrant’ - your existence is only worth tolerating if you bring something to the table.
The same fans breaking out the bunting as it started to look as though football really was coming home, here in England, conveniently side-stepped their booing at the start of the tournament of the players taking a knee.
Raheem Sterling may be receiving stick, as a more experienced player, for not stepping up to take a penalty ahead of young Saka. But imagine how much worse it would have been had he too missed.
It hurts to say it as there are so many good people using their platforms to push back and calling out abusers both on and offline.
But for many people this really is who they are. It really is what they stand for, it most definitely is where we are as a country, much as we might try to convince otherwise.
We can lobby the social media companies to take action but when the will isn’t there to even address racist abuse adequately, you have zero chance of dealing with it.
The brass neck of Prime Minister Boris Johnson issuing a statement of condemnation when he too has been racially abusive on a number of occasions is symptomatic of the lip service Black and brown people have become used to from him and our current government.
England’s Black players will learn from this. Thankfully the support they’ve received from elsewhere will help them to appreciate the esteem in which a sizeable number within this country still holds them.
For the others, there really is no hope.
