Sport and Protest
International competitions such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup abound in national imagery. The various polities compete through their teams of ur-citizens, who act as expressions of a nation’s relative strength, virility, and power. It was no accident that Hitler propagated German-Aryan supremacy at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics during the last decade of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union responded in kind when Los Angeles hosted the 1984 Games.
The magnitude of such events—the eyes of the entire world looking upon the indomitable physical prowess, steely nerve, and mental acumen of sporting heroes—illustrates the political nature of sport. Beyond political disputes, idealized notions of fortitude are represented by athletes themselves. The racial stereotypes associated with Black athleticism combine with other traits associated with Blackness: threatening, dangerous, and violent.
Black athletes who compete internationally for non-African or Caribbean nations inhabit a unique space in the political imaginaries of Western ones. US basketball has benefitted immensely from the talent, diligence, and athletic drive of Black players. France won two World Cups because of the “black, blanc, beur” constitution of its teams—sons of west Africans and Antilleans, Algerians and Senegalese, and white Frenchmen from Nice or Marseille—whose dynamism and verve characterized the 1998 and 2018 tournaments.
These teams, however, found opposition from influential Far Right figures in France, particularly the father and daughter leaders of the National Rally (formerly the National Front), Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. Even so, images of swaggering champions Kylian Mbappé (born in Paris to an Algerian [Kabyle] mother and Cameroonian father and raised in the commune of Bondy), Paul Pogba (born in the commune of Lagny-sur-Marne in Paris’s eastern suburbs to Guinean parents), and N’Golo Kanté (born in Paris to Malian parents) hoisting the cup in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow in 2018 both resisted French racial hostilities and embodied the African element of French football supremacy.
The Black power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics—black gloved hands raised by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal podium to honor their respective first- and third-place finishes in the 200-meter race—is legendary within sporting lore. For two Black men to stand at the pinnacle of their sport—while simultaneously defying the racial politics of exclusion, subordination, and racist indignity of the United States—was an epic moment, one that reverberated beyond the Estadio Olímpico Universitario. Decades later, Colin Kaepernick continued this public demonstration of dissent: holding the United States accountable for racial injustice by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem before NFL games.