by Laurent Dubois
This afternoon the French blog Mediapart published a stunning report, based on several weeks of investigation, that argues that racist ideas have become normalized, indeed banalized, at the highest levels of the French Football Federation. (You can read an English version of the report here). Mediapart reports that, at the end of 2010, several high-ranking members of the F.F.F. — including the current French national team coach, Laurent Blanc, a veteran of the 1998 World Cup campaign — agreed that it was desirable to decrease the numbers of “black” and “Arab” players in the national training academies. They sent out directives to various academies asking them to intervene — among trainees at the age of 12-13 — to effectively limit the number of players of these backgrounds. While many in France on the left and right have for years declaimed and feared the idea that “quotas” would be put in place in order to carry out what is tellingly called “positive discrimination” (i.e. affirmative action) to help diversify universities and other institutions, it seems the F.F.F. was quite literally discussing, and even starting to put into effect, a “quota” system aimed at making sure there was what they considered the appropriate number of “white” players, who seemed to have been deemed by some generally more tactically intelligent.
Since I read this piece this afternoon, I’ve been stunned by the skid into delirium this represents. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised: after all, racist commentary about the French team has a long history, and reached a dangerous peak during the 2010 World Cup fiasco. (In late June of last year, for instance, a small crowd of protestors entered the F.F.F. headquarters, demanding that it create a team that was “white and Christian” by “firing” “blacks and Arabs“). And yet this is nothing short of a powerful form of treason — not only to the principles of equality that supposedly under-gird French political life, but to the principles of sport as well. That many young men who grow up in the French banlieue (suburbs), subject to economic marginalization and various forms of racial and cultural exclusion, have sought to use sport out of an otherwise highly constrained situation is of course logical enough. After all, it is at least ideally one place where social background and connections shouldn’t really matter: if you play well on the field, if you score goals, no one can claim you didn’t. The French state, meanwhile, has at times strongly supported sports programs in banlieue regions as a way of addressing social issues. And some recruiters for academies explicitly looked to such neighborhoods as they searched for talented young players.
In the last decades, France has produced a string of legendary players: Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry, Lilian Thuram, Claude Makelele, Patrick Vieira, Patrice Evra, Florent Malouda, Lassana Diarra, Nicholas Anelka, Samir Nasri, and Karim Benzema — just to name the ones who have played at the pinnacle of the European professional game in England, Italy and Spain. All of these are French citizens, most born in France (though some arrived as young boys in the country with their parents), and have roots in the Caribbean or Africa (including North Africa). Their tactical and technical brilliance is widely recognized and cherished by a series of professional coaches. Many of these players contributed in crucial ways in winning France it’s only World Cup victory in 1998 — Thuram and Zidane respectively won the semi-final and final for France in that year. They led the team to a European Cup victory in 2000, and again to the final of the World Cup in 2006.
So it is both nauseating and, frankly, just insane that the French Football Federation — rather than acknowledging and confronting it’s own sclerotic institutional culture, which has prevented any significant diversification of it’s administrative ranks — is now actually blaming “blacks” and “Arabs” for causing problems for French football. They have skidded into the realm of dangerous fantasy, deeply demeaning themselves and the sport they are supposed to represent.
Read the Full Essay @ Soccer Politics
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Laurent Dubois is Professor of French Studies and History at Duke University and a leading expert on Haitian history and culture. His books include Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, forthcoming spring 2010), Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History With Documents (with John Garrigus; 2006), and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004).
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