Well, this Slate contrarianism didn't take very long, did it? Clearly Yascha Mounk watched Trevor Noah's segment, but it seems he didn't really absorb what he was saying.
slate.com/news-and-polit…
slate.com/news-and-polit…
The issue, which Noah highlighted in Özil's resignation from the German national team, is that a person of colour is accepted only conditionally as French or German when they win; if they lose or err, they're African, Turkish, a "migrant," etc, framed as an exiling insult.
The point he was making was: what would have happened if one of the French team members missed a kick? What if they lost the World Cup? What would the discourse in France look like? Likely a lot less inclusive. That's the double standard he was pointing to.
Noah's whole speech was, frankly, better cosmopolitanism than Araud's because it didn't appear to demand anyone abnegate crucial parts of their heritage. It says that multiplicity is possible. And only when that is accepted will a team be seen as French when they win *and* lose.
I understand what Mounk is trying to say. Both Araud and Noah are wrong, he claims. But the reality is that the French perspective on national identity is dangerously hollow for non-white people, which represents a wider European problem.
As Noah pointed out, the "spider man" who recently rescued a dangling infant from a French apartment block was given citizenship after the rescue; he was claimed as French. But, Noah observed, had he failed the line would've been "the African dropped the baby."
That duality is the heart of the problem, and it's what Noah, and those who agreed with his take, are pushing back against. It spoke to a lot of non-white Westerners because we've all seen versions of this two-step in our lives.
Our successes are attributed to some association (real or perceived) with whiteness, our failures attributed to pathologies of our ancestral heritage. This isn't new.
