After successfully raising the LGBTQ flag over the World Cup, Western virtue signalers have chosen to focus their criticism on race.
While Argentina’s citizens rejoice over their team’s continued success in Qatar, a left-leaning Washington Post columnist soured the mood by asking, “Why doesn’t Argentina have more Black players at the World Cup?”
Because we are a country, not a Disney movie, was the fast and harsh response from the South American nation on Twitter. We are not going to permit any ignoramus to accuse our lovely country of being racist, read another tweet from the same account. Argentina is not the place for cheap progressives. That encapsulates the prevalent mindset toward the so-called “woke warriors,” who won’t be satisfied until their destructive message reaches every part of the globe.
The first false claim that “approximately one percent” of Argentina’s 46 million people are black didn’t help the article, which was written by Erika Edwards, an associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
In a subsequent clarification, The Washington Post stated that “although the number of black persons quoted was true, the proportion was really significantly less than one percent and the post has been updated to clarify that,” adding that it was an editorial error.
In other words, according to the 2010 census, there were only 149,493 Black people living in Argentina. This fact alone should help explain why the 26-member national team is made up entirely of ‘white’ players—players who, incidentally, the Post writer makes a great effort to argue are not actually white.
The article by Edwards is essentially a history lesson tied to the most popular sport in the world. “This history makes clear that while Argentina’s soccer team may not include people of African descent, or perhaps people that most would view as Black, it is not a ‘White’ team either,” Edwards writes.
She basically says that although there were previously a lot more black people in Argentina, years of European immigration and other government activities helped to “wipe Blackness from the nation.” Black people first arrived in Argentina as slaves, like they did in every other colonial country. In order to avoid marginalization, black and indigenous people have increasingly chosen to blend in with white people and pass as white throughout the years. As a result, the country now has a diverse population from all over the world. These diverse ethnic groupings in Argentina have historically been referred to as morocho (tan-colored), pardo (brown-colored), and trigueo according to their skin tone (wheat-colored).
Diego Maradona, the most well-known football player in Argentina, was a “non-White” morocho who paradoxically rose to become “the face of Argentine soccer” and a “White nation,” as Edwards points out. But when has the tacitly xenophobic home crowd ever objected to that fact? Never.
Is it reasonable to infer that Argentina is a virulently racist country since the black population merged with the “whites” over the period of centuries, as Edwards appears to think? According to the virtue-signaling mob’s logic, integration between the races is also fundamentally good because it is the antithesis of marginalization and segregation. After all, representations of mixed-race couples in advertisements, movies, and other forms of media are praised for advancing equality. However, all of this blending and mixing eventually leads to the “erasure” of “blackness” and any other “race-ness.” It’s something that’s commonly referred to as a “melting pot” and is viewed as positive (incidentally, this description is often debunked as a myth when applied to the United States).
Millions of Middle Eastern migrants, for instance, have been permitted to settle in Sweden, where they have been relegated to the margins of crime-ridden ghettos on the outskirts of major cities. It has become embarrassing, if not a threat to national security, that these people are not integrating into Swedish culture. In reality, the far-right, anti-immigration administration of the Scandinavian nation was just elected to address the problem. Again, all this rhetoric about “black erasure” seems quite bizarre if the end aim is the absorption of minorities into a culture. Will future awakened activists protest “Arab erasure” in the country if and when Arabs become more integrated in Sweden? This aspect of the left-wing critique, provided it exists at all, may be what irritates so many people: Whites appear destined to be demonized no matter what they do.
But even if 90% of Argentina’s population were black, why would it be immediately thought to be racist if no black players were on the team? Athletes should be selected based on their individual merits and capabilities, just as in any other field, rather than because they meet an equitable quota.
Finally, why must a professor from a woke university department in the US make it her business if the racial composition of Argentina’s national team has not raised any concerns from the people of Argentina? The most irritating aspect of social justice warriors may be their presumption that anything that bothers them must equally bother the individuals they are investigating from the safety and seclusion of their ivory towers. In the end, all this accomplishes is to create rifts where none previously existed.
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