Racist Delirium at the French Football Federation

Racist Delirium at the French Football Federation

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).

War Stories from the Faculty Blogosphere

Panel of Faculty Bloggers and Tweeters Discuss Why Researchers Should Use Social Media

Stories from the Faculty Blogosphere
By Karl Leif Bates

Durham, NC -- The popular coinage "social media" would have been an oxymoron only five years ago.

Back then, "media" was a giant megaphone that broadcast information only one way and "social" was being in the same room with other people. Today, everyone is "the media," and we don't even have to be in the same time zone to be social.

While they may take some getting used to, the new tools of social media can be a wonderful way to teach for scholars who used to broadcast (often one-way) to a room full of flesh-and-blood students, according to four social media experts assembled on Sept. 17 to coach about 70 Duke faculty.

The workshop was organized by Duke's Office of News and Communications and the Center for Information Technology.

"Blogging is an ideal forum for scholarly communication," said Laurent Dubois, the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History. Dubois said he started using blogs only about a year ago as a virtual class discussion for his sections on soccer and politics, Haiti and contemporary France. But he quickly saw how the tool added the ability to bring in outside sources of information and have engaging class discussions round the clock.

And his personal dispatches from the World Cup in South Africa led to an invitation to write a commentary for CNN.

"I take risks on my blog," Dubois said. "It's a relief, frankly, to be able to change voices."

Rather than being a distraction from his scholarly duties, contemporary social critic and New Black Man Mark Anthony Neal, sees his social media output as central to his efforts to bring scholarship to a wider audience.

"After a decade of writing for a broader audience, I see myself as a public intellectual," said Neal, a professor of African & African American Studies and a regular columnist on the site Loop 21.com. Neal has become pretty much a one-man social media movement. He maintains three blogs, and also connects with the world through Facebook and Twitter. He recently started a weekly YouTube show, "Left of Black."

He started using Facebook because he found students were ignoring his emails and Twitter (just this year) because he found "alumni still wanting to have the Mark Anthony Neal experience." Now the two sites serve as drivers to bring people to his blog posts, "the home base," where longer, more thoughtful work appears.

Neal is publishing his scholarship digitally and in a timely fashion, and the audience is as wide as it wants to be. "The technology has caught up to my ambitions."

"This sounds like 'knowledge in service to society,' " said moderator David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications.

Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English, blogs, tweets and posts, but spent most of her portion of the panel extolling the connectivity of Twitter. The 140-character bursts from her Twitter connections has almost entirely replaced traditional media for her, and has saved, not consumed, her time, she said. "Twitter is the most efficient thing I do in my day," she said.

The mini-posts themselves, called "tweets," don't say much in themselves -- "it's like Haiku," she said. But the best tweets contain links to larger resources, and by watching trusted streams of updates and passing things along to her own followers, Twitter becomes a new way of staying current, Davidson said. "I use Twitter as my filter on the news. It's a great way of receiving and sending information, but it requires commitment."

The other payoff, Davidson said, was the sense of connectedness and community that social media gives her. Her posts garner immediate feedback and spark interesting discussions.

Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy assistant professor Misha Angrist, aka the blogger GenomeBoy, said blogging doesn't have to feel like homework. In fact, he took a break from blogging for a while when it started to feel burdensome, and now he has found a happy balance where he blogs about things he knows about ,when and where he feels like it. "I've managed to find a way to do this and not go crazy or have it take over my life." Angrist recently joined the ranks of PLoS Blogs, a new family of science bloggers hosted by the Public Library of Science open access journals.

"You don't have to worry about it becoming overwhelming because you can control how much you do it," Dubois added

Lynne O'Brien and her staff from the Center for Instructional Technology showed faculty how they too could easily use Facebook, Twitter and WordPress blogs and answered questions from the technical to the philosophical. Their tutorials can be found at cit.duke.edu/blog/2010/09/17/socialmediaworkshop/ or you can see what participants thought of the session, as it happened, by checking the hashtag #dukesocial on Twitter. (Or just click here to execute a Twitter search on that tag.

FIFA World Cup '10: Black Star Tragedy

Black Star Tragedy
by Laurent Dubois

Football, we learned last night during the Ghana-Uruguay game, is the most effective tool for mass torture every devised by the human race. A vast majority of the over eighty thousands fans in the stadium, and millions of viewers throughout the world, were left speechless and unwound by what we saw unfold. For me, it was a little bit like reliving the final of the World Cup in 2006, with an early euphoria followed by an equalizer, then a game dragging on and on into penalties, with Gyan’s missed shot at the last minute playing the role of Zidane’s head-butt as the dramatic and decisive instant of the night. The sorrow, the indignity, the sense of unfairness of it all was too much to even contemplate. For many people throughout the world, the Cup essentially ended yesterday with the elimination of Brazil and Ghana. For all those who hoped, for a brief time, that this would be the year for an African team to go further than any had before, the remaining games seem somehow sapped of meaning.

The night began very differently. The atmosphere in the city was electric yesterday, with everyone in South Africa seemingly behind Ghana, and the flags and emblems of the country everywhere. The symbolism of it all was, of course, great. Fifty years ago Ghana’s independence began the wave of decolonization on the continent. In 1966 Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, led a boycott of the World Cup by African nations unhappy with the fact that only one of he sixteen berths in the competition was reserved for either an African team or an Asian team. The boycott was successful, and set in motion a long process through which African countries have gained more power within FIFA. The South African World Cup was in some sense the culmination of that long process. To see Ghana advance to the semi-finals, which no African country ever has in the World Cup, would have been a fitting and inspiring confirmation that things have changed, and that they can change, in the world of football.

Of course, there was reason to be cautious. Though Ghana was the last of the African teams in the tournament, it is a young team and weakened substantially in its striking power by the absence of Michael Essien. They had played well against the U.S., but had seemed less convincing in the group phase and only advanced thanks to the loss by Serbia to Australia. They might pull it off, we all knew, but it was going to be tough.

For the game, however, most had thrown caution to the wind. You could find a few small Uruguay flags to buy on the way in to Soccer City, but mostly it was every kind of merchandise in the colors of Ghana. Fans from all over the world decked themselves out in Ghana scarves (I picked up a rather handsome one!), Ghana hats, Ghana gloves, Ghana face paint, and waved small and large Ghana flags. There were of course groups of the famous stalwart Black Star fans as well. Everyone knew what the right outcome was, it seemed. And as the game began, it seemed like Ghana was in a position to win. They played beautifully. They were exciting to watch. The charged the goal, seeking openings in the tough Uruguayan defense, and seemed technically superior in many of the encounters. And then came Muntari’s goal.

The rest of the story is I can not quite bear to run through. But that it so happened that a Uruguay defender, pushing the ball out with his hands, prevented a Ghanaian goal, and that what football can offer in response is a penalty kick. And that it fell to Gyan, a young player who on a team with Essien had come to bear the burden of Ghana’s attack, to take that penalty, and who under the pressure hit the bar. And that the burden of the loss falls on him rather than on the Uruguayan who cheated. And that this, it seemed, simply devastated the team, which was not able to rally effectively during the penalty kicks. And that all of the urging on, the beautiful cacophony and integrated vuvuzelas of the crowd, the millions of prayers, among them mine, repeatedly spoken during the match, that all of that led to what it did is unbearable. To watch Gyan, sobbing uncontrollable, consoled by his teammates on the pitch, was – like the entire match – purely gut-wrenching.

Read the Full Essay @ Soccer Politics

Race and the French Soccer Debacle

France's soccer empire in ruins?
by Laurent Dubois, Special to CNN

The world watched with awe and derision this past week as the French national soccer team, boasting a roster of star players, imploded on and off the field at the World Cup.

In case you missed it, here's the play-by-play. At half-time during the France-Mexico game, striker Nicolas Anelka insulted French coach Raymond Domenech in the locker room.

Such words, of course, are heard frequently in the half-time locker rooms of losing teams the world over -- though not so often spoken to a coach's face. They don't, however, usually decorate the covers of newspapers.

But there was a leak, and in a gesture that was extremely profitable (if of questionable journalistic integrity,) the French sports newspaper L'Equipe published Anelka's insults as their headline. Anelka refused to apologize for the outburst, and the player was sent home.

It might have ended there, except that the French players did what all self-respecting French workers would do in the situation: Led by team captain Patrice Evra, they went on strike, refusing to practice last Sunday.

Their action incited a wave of anger in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly criticized the players, and right-wing politicians did so even more harshly. Both Anelka and Evra are black, and there was racist vitriol hurled at them online.

The intellectual Alain Finkielkraut -- already well known for having derided the French team as being "black-black-black" in 2006 -- lambasted them on primetime television. The players, his argument went, were "hooligans," raised in the banlieues (French projects,) with no sense of dignity and no patriotism, and lacking proper respect for authority.

For years, many in France had stridently complained about the French coach, Raymond Domenech and the French Football Federation that kept him in his post through one failure after another. Suddenly, though, a surprising number of people seemed ready to scapegoat the "spoiled" and ungovernable players, particularly Anelka and Evra, for the failures of the French team.

Read the Full Essay @ CNN

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Laurent Dubois is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. He recently published "Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France," and is founding editor of the Soccer Politics Blog.

The Future of Learning: FutureWeb 2010

Future of learning to be determined by students, panel says

Though they discussed a wide array of topics, the Future of Learning Panel centered its conversation on one theme articulated by session Chair Cathy Davidson: “How do we make the most of traditional institutions and unite worlds that are not always part of our institutions as traditionally conceived?”

The panel consisted of five professors from Duke University:

* Cathy Davidson, co-founder of HASTAC – the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory
* Laurent Dubois, a historian of French colonialism and the Caribbean
* Negar Mottahedeh, a highly respected academic author who staged the first-ever Twitter Film Festival
* Mark Anthony Neal, the author of four books, a frequent commentator for National Public Radio and contributor to several on-line media outlets
* Tony O’Driscoll, author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration,” with Karl M. Kapp.

In addition to discussing the future, the panelists talked about some of their individual experiments with technology in the classroom. Mottahedeh spoke about her experiment with the Twitter Film Festival in her introduction to film studies class. Students posted video clips to a class blog and Tweeted about them with links to analysis. The effort attracted more than 300 followers from all walks of life.

Dubois is currently working on a project called the Haiti Lab that will link Haitian students with faculty through the Internet to continue education while the country is still in a state of disrepair.

“There’s a need for the university to be a space of rapid reaction,” he said. “Haiti needs an immediate plan and action.”

Read the Full Essay HERE