Africa has won the world cup! A victory for diversity! At last the French flag means something to me!
These are a handful of the sentiments that have come through since the team of men playing under the auspices of the French flag won the World Cup earlier today.
Of course, the team comprising several players of African and Arab heritage are national heroes, just as Mali immigrant Mamoudou “Spiderman” Gassama was a few months ago, when he defied the limits of gravity and of anti-refugee sentiment to rescue a child inexplicably dangling from a fourth floor balcony.
The things brown and black people have to do to be accepted as fully fledged members of the national community, hey?
“Basically, if I score, I'm French. And if I don't score or there are problems, I'm Arab,” said former striker Karim Benzema in 2011, summing up the crux of the dilemma facing immigrants in western societies: our inclusion is always conditional. As long as people of colour are beneficial to the country, as long as they serve, don’t complain, and - most crucially - as long as they entertain, then they are accepted.
And because they are accepted, because of the success of this specific handful of men, then the marginalisation of millions of others has no need to be addressed. Now, I don’t begrudge the players their victory.
As Roxane Gay tweeted today, right after noting that when Haitians drove the French colonisers out in 1804 the French government demanded $20 billion in compensation for lost income from the emancipated slaves: “Congrats to the players who played a great game” (I’ll take her word for it).
Haiti was still paying back that debt until 1947 by the way. Nor do I begrudge the fans their vicarious joy. But this fantasy of a soccer match as something that heralds a move in a more inclusive direction, where the legacies of colonialism are suddenly inconsequential, despite never having been reckoned with, and people of colour have finally proved their humanity and right to be included...well we have seen it before.
Famed French linguist and philosopher Roland Barthes noted the myth behind this fantasy of an inclusive national identity way back in 1957, when he happened across a copy of Paris Match magazine replete with a patriotic cover of a young, wide-eyed black soldier in French military uniform, saluting what is presumably the French tricolour.
“I see very well what it signifies to me,” he wrote, “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this (black soldier) in serving his so-called oppressors.”
This, says Barthes, is how national myths are constructed. The reality of empire (and in contemporary times, the reality of the inferior status occupied by communities of colour), recede to the background. Racism? What racism? How can France be racist when there are so many black and brown men on the national team?
Myth, Barthes continues, creates “a world which is without contradictions.” In his time, it erased the need to discuss why there was a French empire; there just was and look here is a black man saluting that very empire so how can it be bad? And in our times, it silences the question of just why there are so many Arabs and Africans playing for France (they come from former French colonies and have been treated abysmally for decades). There is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged racism than the victory shown by this football team.
In other words, what the diversity of the French soccer team means is that Africans and Arabs are French. For today at least. But come tomorrow, 50 percent of France’s African and Arab youth will still be unemployed. Come tomorrow, the country’s prisons will still be disproportionately stacked with Muslims and the banlieues - sprawling outer suburban housing projects - where racial profiling is a way of life and opportunities are virtually non-existent will still be known as the “other France.”
And for all the diversity on the pitch, the VIP room in the stands where President Macron was snapped pumping in the air in victory, curiously had little to no space for people of colour. No room for myths where it really counts; not where the power is.
