BURTON-ON-TRENT, England — Gareth Southgate mentions the letter almost as an aside. It had arrived at his home, out in the Yorkshire countryside. He does not go into detail about its contents beyond the fact that it was not exactly constructive feedback. It was best described, he said, as a “very strange letter about race.”
A few years ago, perhaps, the 52-year-old Southgate would have found it unsettling: not just the views it espoused but also the violation of his privacy, the threat implicit in an unsolicited piece of mail landing on his family’s doorstep. It is not, though, the first correspondence along those lines that he has received.