Two Afro-Ecuadorian players, Carlos Tenorio and Agustín (Tín) Delgado, marked the goals. On 9 June 2006, the Ecuadorian team won 2-0 against Poland in their first match of the tournament in the Gelsenkirchen stadium in Germany. This essay is focused on the comments published in the press and on the internet about the performance of the almost entirely black Ecuadorian national team at the 2006 FIFA World Cup-the biggest global sports arena there is. Such events can also give a special stage to victorious athletes from subaltern groups or excluded peoples. Participation in international sports competitions often provides “national populations”-and particularly their elites-with occasions to enact the official understanding of “national identity,” or sometimes also to reflect upon and revisit what and who is included in, or excluded from, the “national character,” and why. … The world of sport has thus become an image factory that disseminates and even intensifies our racial preoccupations. Whether new or old, cultural or biological, what … racisms have in common is their dependency on, and ultimate reduction to, a belief in the biological separation of the human population into visible and discrete groups that is “race.” With the widespread belief that it is an open, autonomous and meritocratic arena, sport is fundamental in informing people’s perceptions about the naturalness and obviousness of racial difference. A close analysis of the commentaries published in the press and on the internet reveals the continued prevalence of an “ideological biology of national identity” behind the strategies adopted by some, among the white and white-mestizo Ecuadorian elites and middle classes, to downplay the impact of the black players’ success, with the objective of limiting the unsettling of social norms and of countering the threat to hegemonic concepts and practices of “national identity” that this success could have led to. Race, Fútbol, and the Ecuadorian Nation: the Ideological Biology of (Non-)Citizenship Jean Muteba Rahier | Florida International UniversityĪs evidenced by the series of commentaries that followed the good performance of the (almost entirely black) Ecuadorian football team at the 2006 Mundial (FIFA World Cup), the place of blackness within/without Ecuadorian national identity continues to be ambiguous.
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