This article, dated May 2012, highlights the fears of racism that cast a dark cloud in the run up to the 2012 European Cup. The Cup was hosted by both Poland and the Ukraine, countries known for xenophobia and racism. The article makes note of the effects racism has not only on the players but also on the fans and speculates how the Leagues, players and host nations will deal with any incidents.
While this incident occurred over two years ago, this is simply a prime example of blatant racism in the footballing world.
Djibril Cisse was the victim of racial abuse during the 2011 season in the Greek football league and claimed that racism was an issue throughout the entire league. Players even stormed the field after a game and attacked him.
Cisse insisted, “I was their target. Some of them hit me and I retaliated to defend myself. It’s a disgrace”.
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
Michael Banton’s piece on the theories of race help the readers understand how the idea of race came to be and how different races were identified. Cuvier believed that one’s physical prowess determined the quality of their culture and the limits of their mental abilities. Banton’s article explains the theories behind racism, a social response that cannot be inherited, yet can be learned through social practices. The creation behind different races seems to be linked to the belief that whites were superior beings to humans of different color, race allowed European colonists to justify their capitalist motives in foreign territories.
Banton points out that while discrimination and crime are inevitable parts of society, racial discrimination places certain people within a perceived social category solely based off of differences in appearance. The theories of race piece also explain a shift in the use of different racial identifications from one that justified exploitation of labor to practices of expulsion.
Mikalila and Lemonik declare that race was born out of capitalist beliefs, those who could not advance as quickly or as efficiently as the Europeans did must be lesser beings. Colonizing the Irish helped establish a racial dominance that the British spread throughout the expansion of their empire. If race was not born out of capitalism it must have been a belief founded in religion where whites claimed that blacks must be lesser beings because they believed they were the descendants of Ham. What caught my attention was the creation of the IQ test in 1905 Continue reading
This article I found discusses the player Eusébio da Silva Ferreira who was born in Mozambique before the country was independent and played soccer for a Lisbon club team along with the Portugal national team.
Also despite being from Africa he was voted European player of the year in 1965. The article discusses the impact he has had on soccer in Mozambique and Africa and how his career blazed the trail for African players to play for European clubs.
In the first set of readings race is defined as emerging from the capitalist and colonist experiences of Europeans who sought to justify their dominance and control foreign resources, land and people. The concept of race defined individuals according to physical characteristics and implied a certain disposition and character that would be unchangeable for the individual and their descendants.
The “science” behind race though proved to be shaky and ever changing based on individual circumstances and a non-uniform number of classifications across the world. Some societies, such as the US used the “one drop rule” which classified a person with any African ancestry as black, while the South African government under Apartheid would classify mixed race individuals as colored. Some racial theorists would also break down groups even further and consider the white race to actually be a collection of races.
This disparity in definitions and classifications along with a lack of biological evidence in favor of a biological differential between the popular concepts of race led modern scientists to discard the classification in the physical sciences but the concept lives on in the social sciences. The beliefs people still hold about race and its implications continue to affect modern societies despite its lack of scientific grounding.
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
Unequal Development:
In the eighteenth century was the first attempt to utilize race as a scientific concept. A French anatomist Cuvier started this in 1817 and he divided the races into three subspecies Caucasians, Mongolians and Ethiopians. All this make different races start being more superior to others. Cuvier states “ whites had gained dominion over the world and made the most rapid progress in science. ‘Yellows’ were less advanced, and blacks degraded”. So race was used as a taxon. To spread the ideology they used novels and people who were notable.
Early Social Science:
The ecological theory developed by Robert E. Park in Chicago maintained that migration brought distinctive people into contact; competition made them conscious of what distinguished them, and those in a superior status developed prejudice as a defensive reaction.
Reaction: Competition creates racial tension and this is why we see migrant people face difficulties when they migrate to a new country. How can science be the way Continue reading
The first article, Banton’s Theories of ‘Race’ seeks to define Race as a social construct born out of the scientific and social enlightenments of the last few centuries. He argues that the development of race as a science was adopted in order to find meaning to what was, at the time, a complete European domination of other cultures. Banton shows, along with Mariel Mikaila and Arthur Lemonik’s article “Race”, how race is an inherently social construct stemming from geographic, political, cultural, economic and religious factors. Their articles shed light on late 19th and early 20th century attempts by social scientists to create a scientific approach to racism, such as Curie ‘European, African, Mongoloid theorem’ or social Darwinist principles. Mikaila and Lemonik go on to argue the consequences of race in modern society particularly in its limiting factor and its ability to create social, political and economic stress on society. Continue reading
Race, as Michael Banton details in the article Theories of “Race”, was first academically described by the intellectuals in Europe. Observing the inequalities between European colonizers and the impecunious colonized, many “attributed inequality in development to different biological inheritance” (Banton 1).
Furthermore, race was used as a classification system, as discussed in another article by Mariel Mikalia and Arthur Lemonik. One can certainly claim today that race is not the sole cause of poverty or underdevelopment; the first analyzers of race, I believe, were mistaken. I believe the educated Europeans who initially explored race studies confused with an observation with an explanation and failed to delve deeper into certain topics.
To start, I believe these academics noted the disparities in the quality of life between themselves and those in their colonies. Unable to explain this phenomenon, they attributed the gap to race, since these trends of racial minorities in squalor were nearly ubiquitous throughout the age of imperialism. Then, these academics hence failed to examine further than this point until Darwinism introduced new ideas of fitness and survival, which were subsequently linked to caucasian superiority. Continue reading