The one major political incident during the World Cup was not about race. It was about a Croatian player’s cryptic reference to Ukraine, a mention that some interpreted as a rebuke of Russia’s role in the civil war there.
There was none of the crude racial taunting that dogged Thierry Henry during his illustrious career with the French national team. And no fan threw a banana to a player as a racial insult as happened to Daniel Alves, a Brazilian player for Barcelona FC. Yet the race question remained an undercurrent narrative throughout the World Cup.
To begin with, there was the prominent role of African and Caribbean immigrants or their offspring in some major European teams, with France’s case being the most pronounced. Someone who didn’t know any better would be excused to assume that France is a country in sub-Saharan Africa. And, in a sense, its team represented Africa.
For the first time since the 1982 World Cup, no African team advanced to the knock-off stage. The two teams representing Africa that year, Senegal and Algeria, missed advancing because of tie-break rules. This year, Nigeria and again Senegal were poised to advance had they not conceded last-minute goals. In fact, Senegal still might have advanced were it not the first victim of FIFA’s new tie-break rule: fair play points as measured by the number, type and sequence of flags. Senegal had two more yellows than Japan, and that dropped it to third place in their group. And so, Africa’s hopes in the World Cup this year were dashed earlier than usual.
The only consolation was the brilliance of the largely black French team. Even before the tournament began, a friend had joked that it was the best African team in the tournament. So, when France won, Africa rejoiced.
In their celebration, the players themselves put their African identity front and centre. It was my 12-year-old son — a soccer enthusiast and potential future star — who brought it to my attention. “Daddy, that sounds like African music,” he said, as he showed me a video of the players drumming, singing and dancing.
Their triumph took place in the backdrop of US President Donald Trump’s trashing of illegal immigrants, comments that essentially sully all working-class immigrants. He has repeatedly declared that illegal immigrants are to blame for murders, rapes, and other vicious crimes. It is as though he believes that those crimes will be eradicated in the United States once all illegal immigrants are deported and kept away.
The triumph of the French team may well be a providential rebuke to Trump, a reminder of what immigrants can — and do — contribute to countries that take them in.
Of course, it is just sports. The victory did not bequeath France with a vast gold mine. Yet, its impact on the French cannot be measured in Francs. The value of the euphoria and national pride cannot be quantified.
A French former colleague, who was visiting home, “texted” me that the streets of Paris were flooded by merrymakers after every victory. Of course, they were delirious after the final whistle of the world’s most riveting quadrennial contest. That will have a massaging effect on the national psyche for quite some time. And that counts for much.
Neymar is not black … and other ‘heresies’
Another dimension of race matters that emerged in the World Cup is the question of what constitutes being black. More than any other, the Brazilian team inevitably raised that question merely by having several players that occupy the racial spectrum between black and white. Not surprisingly, a comment that striker Neymar made in 2010 somehow resurfaced.
Asked whether he had experienced racism, the then 18-year-old said he hadn’t, and then added, “It is not as though I am black.” This addition set off a firestorm of criticism. As a Brazilian journalist put it in an article in the New York Times, the issue was that “he appeared to distance himself from his black heritage.”
But had the son of a black father and a white mother said he is black, he would equally have appeared to distance himself from his white heritage. Yet blacks take it as a given that anyone who occupies the aforementioned spectrum is black. So, former U.S. President Barack Obama is black, though like Neymar, he had a black father and a white mother.
It’s not often that we reflect on the fact that this definition of blackness was handed down by American segregationists. They decreed that anyone with as much as a drop of African blood is a black person. To the segregationists, this was a convenient rule for exclusion. And to blacks it was a boon for the solidarity of the excluded. It made it easier to aggregate to fight racism.
Brazilian whites took an opposite strategy. As Brazilian journalist Cleuci de Oliveira explained in the New York Times article, Brazilian whites chose not to cede the spectrum to blacks. Rather they favoured the strategy of “whitening” blacks to dilute their numerical clout. The assumption was that so long as biracial people are accorded greater privileges, they wouldn’t see themselves as blacks, and the two groups would not form a political block against whites. Thus was established what Oliveira dubbed “pigmentocracy.”
Not surprisingly, Neymar’s assertion that he has not experienced racism because he is not black contrasts with the experience of his legendary predecessor, Pele, who is dark-complexioned. “If I had to stop or shout every time I was racially abused, every game would have to be stopped,” he is quoted as saying.
So, when biracial people say they are not black, they are seen as laying claim to the higher order of racial merit. But the fact is that they are not black. Neymar is not black, nor is Obama or Tiger Woods. They are biracial people.
For a classification that better reflects the reality, American academics have long favoured the term “people of colour” to encompass everyone but whites. But to find this acceptable, one has to overlook another untenable assumption: that white is not a colour.
In any case, all this jousting for the right racial classification will become irrelevant when pigmentocracy — in the words of the Emperor Halle Selassie — “is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned” — everywhere. All that can be said for now is that there has been considerable progress in that regard.
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