Multi-Colored France

I don’t know much about French politics these days. But I find it fascinating that the French starting line-up has three apparent Caucasians (Barthez, Sagnol, Ribery) in it and is otherwise made up of lots of differently colored players. Apparently, when they won in 1998, there was a period of romanticizing multi-culturalism, which quickly went back to sour ethnic (and more importantly: class and economic) relations. There is an informative article in today’s Observer. After notorious racist politician Le Pen spouted off about the team’s make-up, Lilian Thuram said this at a press conference:

What can I say about Monsieur Le Pen? Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown. I think that reflects particularly badly on a man who has aspirations to be president of France but yet clearly doesn’t know anything about French history or society.

That’s pretty serious. He’s the type of person who’d turn on the television and see the American basketball team and wonder: “Hold on, there are black people playing for America? What’s going on?”

When we take to the field, we do so as Frenchmen. All of us. When people were celebrating our win, they were celebrating us as Frenchmen, not black men or white men. It doesn’t matter if we’re black or not, because we’re French. I’ve just got one thing to say to Jean Marie Le Pen. The French team are all very, very proud to be French. If he’s got a problem with us, that’s down to him but we are proud to represent this country. So Vive la France, but the true France. Not the France that he wants.

[Thanks to the NY Times world cup blog for the quote and the link to the Observer article.]

I’ll be cheering for France today, for many reasons, but one reason is that I want to celebrate the reality of diversity.