I wrote a similar article on this topic last years. Here, posted on Medium this week:
The Myth of the Physical African Team
I love listening to white men who run commentaries of games, always fascinated by the kind of discourses produced during major events such as the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics. My favorite statement is a signature line from most white analysts commenting on black players. You hear it when a black or African team is described by a supposed pundit or an opponent as a “very physical and quick side.” Even the liberal NBC began their report of Senegal’s opening match by writing that Poland struggled all game against the pace and physicality of Senegal
This idea is a single story consistently perpetuated and circulated from tournament to tournament. In the global arena of sports narratives, it is one that has been normalized because of the unchecked racist assumptions of otherwise well-informed sports pundits.
The ongoing games at Russia have shown again that the football pitch is an arena of the political. The language of othering embedded in the epithets employed in describing Black or African athletes is strikingly familiar in the framework of racial politics. From the perspective of fans, the host country is not as hostile as many had expected. Russia has been more racially tolerant than several on-air and online commentators whose language of reportage and review is replete with coded racial stereotypes.
The Word Cup in Putin’s country definitely presents us with another occasion to reflect on how a section of the western sporting media reproduces a fixed and fixable black/African identity in the discussion of African soccer teams.
To unpack the discursive violence of the “very physical” phrase, you would need to recall that a white team is always already a “tactically disciplined side” that supposedly relies more on reason, creativity, and logic. Not the raw energy and power of the black body.
Never mind that a white team is also said to be “physical” sometimes when partly constituted by a large black presence, as in the French soccer team to the Euros in June. Or think of the Icelandic team at Russia. Their physical presence against Argentina never became reason for a curious essentialization
The context in which “a physical African side” is mooted may be flattering. So I pretend not to note the tensions inherent in a language that perennially marks a black team as incapable of possessing any significant skills, or creativity.
Senegal may have outplayed Poland at the Spartak Stadium in their opening match in Russia, yet for several analysts of the game, it was a controversial win that came mostly on the heels of the pace and power of the Africans, never because they were consistently more tactical than the Polish team. As a matter of fact, in the estimation of many, a Senegalese victory was an upset — precisely because an underwhelming Polish team had been assumed already to be the superior side. The Senegalese players, meanwhile, were, as it is in the tradition of most pundits to, reduced to mere pace and power.
The obvious reality is that the football pitch is made to signify not as a mere site of competition but as an agora of power relations, with white commentators serving mostly as biased arbiters. The politics here is about the performance of knowledge and critical thinking versus the enactment of only physical strength, believed prejudicially by many white commentators to be a black’s team only advantage.
For instance, athletes from Kenya, Ethiopia, and other East African countries to the major track and field events would naturally be seen as unrivaled champions of long-distance events at major sports meets at the Olympics. This view would, however, not because they are expected to win because of any tactical discipline, which, ostensibly, is the white man’s major resource, but because of romanticized notion of physical endurance. it does not matter that as International Boxing enjoys a dominant black presence, so has Wrestling been mostly dominated by non-blacks.
There is a problem of stereotyping when the language used to describe these teams deemphasizes the skills and tactical awareness African teams also demonstrate. The persistent narrative of the strong and physical black team also recuperates a sexual labeling that reaches a ridiculous crescendo when the focus is on black female bodies in sports.
The reproduction of the black body as a space of a particular kind of knowledge that denies the black person’s capacity for thought and creativity is a fetish left unaddressed for so long. Ask a white sport (wo)man about an opponent they have never met and you are likely to get the same answer about physicality and pace if the opponent is black. It is a physical side. End of story. Nothing else matters.
The problem with this idea of physicality is that it is a mythology of racial dispossession the African or black athlete. It operates as a form of ideological speech, which many African soccer players may get used to hearing to the detriment of their own creativity. In a Barthesian sense, this common tirade is system of speech that enfleshes racial bias. African sports teams in Russia and in future sporting events are more than raw energy.
By not discerning the ideological universe of these sports narratives, we lose the ability to challenge and question the hegemony they consolidate and normalize. It is time to be alert to the representations of the African person in sports, whether it is soccer or track and field events. This alertness assures that we can deconstruct a static African sports identity produced and reproduced by insensitive white commentators.
While black players can be proud of their physicality, it is not all there is to them. There is no denying the fact that every sport requires a lot of energy and physical stamina. Both black/African athlete and their white counterparts exert much energy to win games. The English Premier League, to give a final example, is know to have commentators who describe black players, not for their technique, but their pace, physicality, and power. Hardly are similar descriptions used when extolling white players that are equalling strong. Think of players from Scandinavia.
To reduce only the black athlete to their physicality in media discourse is a reductionist gesture that denies their creativity and the aesthetic vision of black sportsmen and women. African and black sportsmen are more than their bodies. The coverage of black bodies and the discourses around them require an urgent rewriting.
https://medium.com/@yeku.james/the-myth ... 3323cb8f32