By Francio Guadeloupe and Pedro deWeever
Pedro de Weever has a BA in English and in Business Administration. He has worked as a lecturer at the University in St. Martin on St. Maarten, the National Anthropological and Archaeological Memory Management (NAAM) in Curaçao, and is currently working in the department of communication for the government in St.
Maarten. Pedro is also a photographer, journalist, and independent writer.
Francio Guadeloupe (Aruba) has worked at various tertiary institutions in both the Caribbean and the European parts of the transcontinental sovereign state of Kingdom of the Netherlands. From 2013 to 2017 Guadeloupe served as the President of the University of St. Martin (USM), on the bi-national Caribbean island of Sint Maarten (Dutch) and Saint Martin (French). Guadeloupe is currently a senior research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV-KNAW). He is also an Endowed Professor in the Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Many people who are darker than blue, and those born with other hues, become emotionally enraged whenever a pinkish skinned person likens black people to apes. Such anger was visible as Jack and Jane, Joke and Martijn, Jesús and Luisa, Khadija and Mohammed, Vishal and Arati, Yìhán and Zǐ Chén, Ameri and Imani, Sharine and Juremi, let us just say anti- and nonracist people the world over, took to their keyboards to denounce Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla’s racism against Kylian Mbappé. So too did the French President Emmanuel Macron, the UN Human Rights Office, and Paraguay’s President Santiago Peña who distanced himself from Senator Celeste Amarilla’s unworthy remarks.
But what did Senator Amarilla, who no one outside of Paraguay had heard of before, write on Elon Musk’s X? Upset by the loss of the Paraguay national team, who according to so many soccer fans played rugby rather than football, she posted that Mbappé was a “colonized Cameroonian, pretending hard to be French.” As if that wasn’t enough, playing the racist simian card, Amarilla continued that “instead of mother’s milk, he sucked on coconuts, and the most educated thing he heard were from Chimpanzees.”
Such insulting remarks are not a one-off during this World Cup, being held in the USA, Canada, and Mexico, with the third place playoff between England and France today, and the final between Argentina and Spain tomorrow. Three of the many examples we could furnish will suffice. The Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) launched an investigation and is seeking to criminally penalize those who used social media to post racist comments after Justin Kluivert, Quinten Timber and Crysencio Summerville, three players from the Dutch national squad, missed penalties in the match against Morocco. IShowSpeed, the new media celebrity, who has more than 50 million YouTube subscribers, 45 million Instagram followers and 47 million on TikTok, was also on the receiving end of racist abuse when an Argentine fan told him to ‘go cry at the zoo’ after Argentina beat Cape Verde 3-2. And, as if agreeing with Senator Amarilla, the former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, commenting last Sunday on the Spain-France semi-final, said about the French national team that “they don’t have any French players.” Rajoy’s remarks elicited the ire of Spain’s current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who slammed his predecessor’s xenophobic statements. The damage, however, was done. According to FIFA’s social media protection service (SMPS), there has been a rise in hate speech and racism.
Football cannot insulate itself from a political climate whereby the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement and decolonizing ethics of the ideal of a common humanity without hierarchy are being forcefully contested. The lion’s share of the attention goes to the violent rhetoric and antics of reactionary leaders who want to go back to what they sell as the good old days. By that euphemism they mean the days when the colonized knew their place in the hierarchy of Man: in the back of the bus, in the mines, working the salt pond, cotton and sugarcane fields. They also mean the days when working classes of all colors, slaving in factories and retail, trade and service sector, or lower administration and domestics, knew to bow their heads and step off the sidewalk when honorable wealthy folk were around. The reporting on “simianisation” in the World Cup, a scientific social term for the colonial habit of referring to people of sub-Saharan descent as monkeys, is symptomatic of the contestation being faced.
Such attempts at contesting the gains of the civil rights movements such as universal suffrage, gender equality, sexual emancipation, and the dream of nonracialism, are easy to challenge. No one, not even those who vote for reactionary and authoritarian politicians, really wants to go back to the good old days. What most want who vote for reactionary candidates is simple revenge. They want to teach the elites and the political managerial classes a lesson, not be dominated and mismanaged by new elites and a political managerial class who only cater to the concerns of global fat cats. They are not stupid. A credible progressive political movement that forms institutions that give hurting and disgruntled folk a say and a critical education on global geopolitics and economics, tied to concrete campaigns for fair living wages and a global extension of the gains of social democracy, can stave off the worst of the reactionary impulse.
What such movements cannot do, by focusing on economics alone, is curb prejudice; name calling; monkey noises, and the like. Why not? Well, people who are darker than blue, and those born with other hues, inherited a racial mind map of the world that they treat as common sense. The map we are referring to is the idea that human groups misidentified as ‘races’ belong naturally to certain regions of the world and should behave in certain culturally determined ways. In that map Man (read pinkish skinned, hailing from Europe, belonging to the elite) was furthest from the simians. Sub-Saharan Africans were the closest. In a positive spin, Sub-Saharan Africans are closest to nature; unspoiled.
Nature-talk and cultural determinism are always suspect, as they should be. This is the case even when in the name of progressive politics, activists base their calls for equality and justice on this racial mind map. Racism, and the reference to people of sub-Saharan descent as monkeys will not end if we leave these mind maps unexamined.
We are glad that in responding to Amarilla, Mbappé did not employ the racial mind map of the world. We are also glad that Celeste Amarilla was taken to task for her racism. Unthinkingly employing that map, she wrote Mbappé is not French, as she knew how real French people look: French people look like most of the Paraguayan elite and their professional managerial classes. Amarilla, and with her many in Latin America, even those who erroneously call themselves mixed race, cannot live with the idea that Europe is not lily white anymore and it will not be so again. Can the rest of the world live with that social fact too?
We leave you with this provocation: Aren’t those who rightfully lambast Amarilla, but then in the same breath claim the French team as actually African, propagating the illusion of race?
Discussion