Is Neymar Black? Brazil and the Painful Relativity of Race
1st July 2018
The year was 2010, and Neymar, then 18, had shot to fame in Brazil after a sensational breakout season. During an interview for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, in between a conversation about Disneyland and sports cars, he was asked if he had ever experienced racism. “Never. Not in the field, nor outside of it,” he replied.
“It’s not like I’m black, you know?”
His answer was heard like a record-scratch across the country. Was this young man in denial about his racial identity? Particularly when in the same interview he outlined his meticulous hair care regime, which involved getting his locks chemically straightened every few weeks, then bleached blonde.
To those who obsess on race, the world is full of thorny conundrums. He would certainly qualify as ‘black’ for affirmative-action purposes in the U.S., but apparently Brazil is more ‘nuanced’ about that sort of thing.
That same year, in Spain, a spectator threw a banana at Daniel Alves, Neymar’s fellow Brazilian and then-teammate at F.C. Barcelona. Alves jauntily ate the banana in defiance.
Now that’s comedy. That guy is a Republican in his heart.
“This is the difference between Brazil and America,” Paulo César Lima, the 1970 World Cup champion and black rights activist, said during the 2010 episode. “Over there, if you’re black, you stand up and say you’re black.”
And sometimes, even when you aren’t black, you stand up and say you’re black.
America’s politics of racial purity, which culminated in the notion that even one-drop of African blood made a person legally black, fostered solidarity among those targeted by discriminatory laws.
Reinforced over the last half-century by those pushing Identity Politics, to the point where black people have no concept of who they are except in relation to white people. If all of the white people disappeared from America, black people wouldn’t know what to do.
Brazil, however, the often admirable blurring of racial boundaries is a modern reality that — rather than stemming from colorblindness — is tainted with the sinister origins of state-sanctioned attempts to dilute, even dissolve, blackness.
In other words, they’re trying to build a race-blind society, as Martin Luther King dreamed. But that doesn’t set well with the steeped-in-Identity-Politics propagandists at the New York Times.
Steve Sailer cuts through the crap with his take here:
Basically, wokeness is a form of cognitive shorthand for determining who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys. Instead of having to laboriously work out via objective principles who in a situation is behaving better, you can just tell who is Good and who is Bad by looking at them or listening to them assert their identity claims.
Now, of course, there are endless unresolved complications and disagreements in terms of Intersectional Diversity Pokemon Points. But the holders of Pokemon Points can at least agree that Cishet White Males are Bad, which does a lot to paper over the cracks in the Coalition of the Fringes.