World Cup Brazil 2014: Racial divide behind ‘Beautiful game’

In two days time, the samba drums will beat to the ‘beautiful game, played in beautiful Brazil in front of billions of global fans.

With the exception of countries such as Argentina and Uruguay,-explanation is for  another article- Brazil will be most people’s second favourite team to win the World Cup, outside of their own, of course.

There are two fundamental reasons for this: First, the Brazilians play football which most teams can only dream about. Even when they lose they lose with flair, panache and style. Secondly but equally significant, is the fact that we also fall in with Brazil because it is a nation that conjures up a musical, multicultural melting pot, which although most countries don’t want for themselves, they paradoxically admire it.

Truth is the notion of this magical multicultural melting pot couldn’t be further from the truth. Brazil like all of Latin American countries has been in deep denial about its racial prejudice and segregation for a long time.

Brazil above all has a particular denial problem, because at one level descendents of Africans who were enslaved by the Portuguese have clearly interacted with the fairer skinned Latinos to have perhaps the largest mixed heritage nation in the world, and yet the colour code hierarchy which puts the white European/American on the top and the darker skin African/Caribbean on the bottom is undeniable.

It is as Charles M Mill puts in his most illuminating book, ‘The Racial Contract’, “all pervasive”.

Whether you are black, brown, or white, the hegemony or dominance of ‘white supremacy’ means that everyone knows their place. He goes on to say that the ‘white privilege is so all-consuming that the white people in these countries pay little or no regard to their privilege. It’s just there, its not even acknowledged.

And given that Brazilian football is the nation’s greatest global currency, you don’t have to look very far to see how this phenomenon is played out.

We’ve all see the Brazilian teams over the years. They have stood out precisely because the players are often made up of black, brown and white players. Football like athletics is one of the few sports in which a God-given talent can trump privilege.

And yet when you go to Wikipedia and type in Brazilian players with African heritage, only a dozen or so players appear, including Pele, Jairzinho, Ronaldinho, Neymar and Robinho. Of the hundreds of Brazilian players only a dozen with African heritage? Come on!

What about the great Socrates, Ronaldo, and Danny Alves who was recently thrown a banana by a racist spectator, doesn’t their African heritage count?

The clue lies with the mentality of Brazilians buying into the ‘racial contract’. The World cup winning Brazilian centre forward Ronaldo, whose mother can only be described as black, was once asked what were his thoughts in regards to racism in Brazil? He responded calmly:

You shouldn’t ask me because I’m white.”

This from a man whose black mother was turned away from the ground to see her son precisely because she was black.

In a nation already shockingly divided by rich and poor, the racial divide only deepens the problem for black and brown Brazilians. We’ve all seen the impoverished, often crime ridden favelas on our TV screens. Extreme poverty often breads extreme violence. A few months we ran a story on this site about local business leaders getting rid of the homeless children-often black- by gunning them down in cold blood, with the police being complicit.

The recent riots too, which began a few years ago, began as a direct response to the have and have not’s in this deeply unequal society.

And whilst top flight football is still more mixed than anywhere else in Brazil, a snapshot of the fan base quickly tells who can and who cannot afford a football ticket. 40 dollars to see a match is beyond most Brazilian's income and so the fan base becomes almost exclusively white. Sadly we shouldn’t be too surprised if we see the same thing during the World Cup.

We love the Brazilian team/s as we did the World Cup France 1998 winning team for all the right reasons: Wonderful football and a dynamic multicultural team.

But we mustn’t be fooled that the team is a snapshot of a nation comfortable with it's diversity. In Brazil as in France they are anomalies-oddities- which only certain sports have the magic to conjure.

The transitional link from sporting prowess to every day equality rests within the nation’s political will to first identify the racial problem and then fix it. Part of that process must also come from footballers, athletes and activists who can skilfully use the global platform and demand that a nation's talent, such as football , could easily extend beyond the ‘level playing field’, if greater equality were given to all.

Let’s enjoy the ‘beautiful game’, we deserve that, but with our eyes wide open as to what lies behind it and what our role is to change it.

Simon Woolley