Alfred Dawes | Black Argentinian footballers

Nothing else across cultures elicits the raw emotions felt when supporting a football team. It is enough to make grown men, players and fans cry inconsolably. It is the primal instinct of cleaving to a clan that bonds fans together in support of their favourite teams. It is also the emotions emanating from that primitive brain, that bring out the worst in us. Racism ever so often rears its ugly head in football.

Whether it’s from fans’ monkey chants to tabloids demonising black players whose missed penalties eliminate their team. Fans can be banned from games, and home teams penalised for their behaviour. Some countries, like Italy, are notorious for racist fans. In France, the offspring of migrants are migrants, until they don the national colours. Thereafter, any characterisation of them as migrants is “denying their Frenchness”. And then, there is Argentina.

Quite a lot has been said about the lack of diversity in the Argentinian football teams. As the only country in South America to field all white teams, this is seen as a sure sign of racism. Those with a passing knowledge of history are quick to point out Argentina’s systematic genocide of its significant black population in the 19th century. How could any black person support Argentina with that history of racism?!!! While there is no disputing the national effort to reduce the black population back then, this story is not as peculiar and uniquely malevolent as it is told. It is again the emotional brain confabulating that this solitary country’s racist past is enough for them to be judged in perpetuity. Some of those quick to hurl stones at Argentina support England, Belgium, France, Spain, South Africa, Italy, Germany, and of course, Brazil. How does this make any sense at all?

LITTLE IS SAID

Very little is said about the racist past of those aforementioned countries. The vitriol is reserved for Argentina. In 1861, all of Argentina had abolished slavery, a culmination of the first abolition act of 1813, when babies born to slave women were freed. Brazil, on the other hand, was the last Western country to abolish slavery in 1888, after Marcus Garvey and Alexander Bustamante were born. The European powers created the worst form of slavery ever recorded, in the plantation economies of the Americas and in African colonies.

The barbarity of slavery in the Americas has only one historical comparison anywhere in the world, the Belgian Congo. The worst European enslaver, King Leopold II of Belgium, had a colony carved out during the Berlin Conference as his personal possession. The king promised to protect and civilise the natives. What followed was their brutal enslavement and one of the worst genocides in history, where 10 million Congolese perished before the territory was wrested from his control. The Germans perfected their concentration camps on the Herero and Nama people of Namibia long before Auschwitz. Their history is never mentioned except in the characterisation of Argentina as a post-World War II Nazi haven. However, the role the Americans played in shuttling Nazis to safety during Operation Paperclip must never be mentioned!

The whitening of a country “to bring progress and civilisation” has often been played up in the commentary as if it was a uniquely Argentine practice. In fact, many countries encouraged European immigration as a means of increasing their white population. Brazil, Uruguay and even Cuba embraced the practice. The southern states in Brazil are considerably “whiter” than the more northern states, punctuated with a strong German presence in Blumenau, the host city of the second largest Oktoberfest in the world. Blacks in those southern states are a rare sighting given the make-up of the football team and the demographics of the population. The United States boosted their white population by encouraging European migration with land grants, and laws were passed that limited the immigration of not only blacks, but Chinese as well. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free were only to be of a lighter hue.

GROSS EXAGGERATION

Many of the reasons postulated as to why there was a precipitous drop in the black population of Argentina are conjectures that modern scholarship has soundly refuted. For example, the use of black slaves as cannon fodder during the many Argentine wars is a gross exaggeration. While numerous black lives were lost, a significant number of blacks simply deserted in large numbers, fleeing mostly to Brazil and Peru. Even then, the black population was still a third of the total after the abolition of slavery. That blacks died disproportionately in the Yellow Fever outbreak of 1871, leading to a precipitous fall in their numbers, was shown by Carolina Maglioni’s research to be false as well.

One un-sensational reason why there are so few blacks in Argentina today is interracial marriages. Blacks and mixed people could climb the social ladder in that racist society, if they married into the ever-increasing white immigrant population. This was the opposite of the US racial laws where a drop of black blood made you black and of a lower class. The Argentine system incentivised changing racial classification, and women marrying whites to give themselves and their children better lives.

Like the mixing in Brazil that produces “Pardos” with varying African features, the Argentinians have the morochos. The label morocho is used to described tanned, non-white people in Argentina. Morochos have played for the national football team, and if the one-drop rule of racial classification is to be used, there are indeed black Argentine footballers. The most famous of them all, Diego Maradona.

- Dr Alfred Dawes is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and CEO of Windsor Wellness Centre. Follow him on Twitter @dr_aldawes. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and alfred.dawes@gmail.com.