England prop Ellis Genge has said head coach Eddie Jones and himself suffered racist abuse during the tour to South Africa in 2018.
The United Kingdom, along with several countries across the world, has seen the Black Lives Matter protests in various cities, which were sparked following the death of George Floyd, who was black, while in police custody in the United States.
Genge has backed the protests and said he was subjected to racial insults while on international duty along with Jones, who was born to a Japanese-American mother.
“When we went on the South African tour in 2018 I remember after a game we were walking through one of the tunnels and they started hurling racist abuse at myself and a few of the other ethnic boys and Eddie himself,” he told the BBC.
“It is still very rife, especially in sport. Look, you can’t control that yourself, you just sort of need to put the message out there.”
Genge also called on increased representation for minorities in senior coaching positions in sport after Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling urged English football to address a lack of black people in high positions.
“Like Raheem Sterling said, if you have got a platform, you can use it,” he added. “It’s something that needs to be stamped out.
“The issue with rugby is that it’s been a white man’s game for a number of years and there’s not really any black coaches or ethnic coaches especially over here in England.”
“I’d love to see black coaches thriving in this game, I think me and Maro [Itoje] spoke about it before.
“There’s not a hunger for it out there at the moment, football pays a lot better, so all the kids that I know that are young and in poverty, they all want to be footballers because they’re all icons, that’s the way they’re presented commercially.”
Information from Reuters has been included in this report.