Author Archives: Cole

Early Football, Race, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil – by Cole Sylvester

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Cole PCQ 1/7/2014

An interesting idea that the article, The Making of Brazilian Football, brings up is the idea that soccer is a sport that can be learned and played by any social or economical class.  It is an easy game for young children to pick up and practice even if they come from a very poor background such as Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima.

“stocking balls served the purpose for the sandlot games hotly disputed by barefoot players, with goalposts easily improvised from any variety of possible materials”

Soccer became more than just a fun activity for many of the nation’s youth, especially because of the prospects of being drafted to more elite teams.  These elite teams were mainly sponsored by European factories with money to pay the players to play.  They also gave rival cities a chance to compete against each other without actually fighting.  Each team would try and out-play, out-support, and out-fund their rivals.  An environment like this was very conducive to training formidable Brazilian players who had strong national and regional pride for their team.  For them, soccer became a way of life rather than an interesting pastime. Continue reading →

Race, Nationalism, Globalization and Sports – by Cole Sylvester

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Cole PCQ 1/6/2014

The article, Theories of “Race” by Michael Banton, takes a look at the idea that “race” does not have a biological reason or empirical existence. Rather, the idea that there are separate “races” of humans who are in some way cognitively or physiologically different from one another gets turned on its head in the 1920s with the advent of racial sociology. Race became known as a mental reaction that “made [distinctive peoples] conscious of what distinguished them” thus “social life built up frustration which individuals released on to scapegoats in the form of displaced aggression”.

The “distinctive peoples” mentioned in Robert E. Park’s ecological theory were only made separate by European capitalism’s need for cheap un-free labor. Because of the early advent of the idea of separate distinctive races, human society has created an environment of subconscious discrimination for anyone who is perceived as different, much like the thinking of 19th century scientists divided Homo sapiens into three subspecies (or races). Instead of a philosophy of inferiorization and exploitation of the 19th century subspecies, our modern globalized society has instead turned to ethnic, religious, and economical “races” that we still create prejudices and discriminate against. Continue reading →