During any sporting event, especially international ones and particularly the really big ones like World Cups and Olympic Games, the question of conflicting allegiances can come into play. This is particularly true for those who might be considered immigrants or somehow not quite native, though it can affect every citizen if their ‘own’ team is eliminated and they need to redistribute their allegiances. A recent and painful example would be for England fans whose glorious, all conquering team were quickly ejected from the proceedings in South Africa just a few painful weeks ago. Who then do they rally around, if anyone, and what would be their inner logic?

For me, I was keen, even at times, passionate, for an African team to do well, and when Ghana started to play some great entertaining football I, along with a billion Africans and the equally huge African Diaspora, rallied around Africa’s last World Cup hope. For the Africans or those of African heritage, that allegiance was obvious. But not so obvious for a white European. I guess it was a case of supporting the underdog, a team from a continent that had never reached a semi final let alone win the damn thing. It was a case of the down-trodden periphery striking back against the empire. It didn’t quite happen, but billions of people, black, brown and some white, desperately wanted it to. Part political statement, part the desire for a fairy-tale ending and part an antidote to the dire footballing display of England, I like so many wept inside when that last Ghanaian kick of the game was cruelly kept out by the Uruguayan professional hand ball. The ensuing missed penalty just made the pain that much harder to bear.

There is no doubt though that a sporting festival like a World Cup can test ones allegiances to the limit. What would I have done had England been drawn against Ghana? Where would my allegiances lay then? I would like to think I would have remained true to the African underdog but these questions of conflicting allegiances are not so simple.

These identity crises occur all the time in sporting encounters and often they defy reason. In golf I always want Tiger Woods to win because here is the first man of colour conquering all before him in a world of white middle class privilege. But when you think of it rationally, by 2010, it was Woods who represented privilege. He was the ultimate corporate symbol who in creed and daily practise had absolutely nothing in common with the common man, black or white. Yet knowing all this, I still cannot quite bring myself to desert the man because despite all, his sporting achievements in the face of entrenched American racial bigotry, is nearly without precedent. Perhaps only the success of the Williams sisters in the face of the white middle-class American tennis circuit can compare. Every time I watch Woods in action I am torn by this contradiction.

All this questioning of identity during sporting encounters made me a keen reader of Gary Younge’s, ‘Who Are We?’ and it proved to be every bit as challenging as the title suggests. Younge produces brilliant chapters on American, Jewish, Irish, Black and female experiences of identity, showing how they not only overlap but how there are as many if not more divisions within a particular grouping than between groups. His own autobiographical notes in the first chapter give great insight into the conflicting identities of a Black person living in Britain.
As for Black people, ditto for all the ethnic minorities that make up the richly diverse nation that is Britain today. In fact Britain, like most nations, has historically always been a melting-pot of immigrants, some coming as invaders, others seeking political or economic refuge from less tolerant parts. So many of those who swagger about with the St George’s Flag or the Union Jack, are themselves sons and daughters of immigrants just a few generations back. And, unlike the absurdity of Norman Tebbit’s 1980’s ‘cricket test’ where new arrivals were expected to always support England, we can reasonable expect a host of divided national loyalties from the British populous.

Much of the theoretical premises of Younge’s book are laid out in the introductory chapter and this chapter alone makes the purchase of the book worthwhile. Younge gets to grip immediately with the dialectic of common identity and difference with his central premise being that even in an age where corporate sameness is sweeping across the planet like never before, the things that we think make us different are still vitally important, whether it be our skin colour, our class, our religious affiliations, our sexual orientation or our nationality. Younge writes:

‘the ways in which we are unalike matter. For all that is common in the human experience, the differences are stark and, in some respects, getting starker, and it is these differences that are increasingly creating the framework for political activity, public anxiety and, at times, moral panic.’P5

Younge then asks:

to what extent can our various identities be mobilised to accentuate our universal humanity as opposed to separating us off into various, antagonistic camps? At what point does refusing to acknowledge the importance of difference become a callous denial of human diversity, and when does stressing it become an indulgent and insidious obstruction to what could potentially unite us?’ P5

Then, casting aside any temptation of lapsing into relativism and plain old psycho-babble, Younge adds:

These are questions that go beyond philosophy to the central issue of power who has it, how do they wield it and in whose interests do they use it? P5

Answering his own rhetorical questions Younge explains:

..the escalation of neo-liberal globalisation has eroded the relevance of the basic unit of democracy the nation state and in so doing disabled the levers with which we could assert our collective will on the world. In the absence of any meaningful way to advance their interests as citizens, many retreat into the laagers of place, race, religion to name but a few – as a means of self defence. P6

I’m not so sure the nation state ever was a basic unit of democracy but Younge’s point still stands. He adds:

What ends as Jihad may begin as a simple search for local identity, some set of common personal attributes to hold out against the numbing and neutering uniformities of industrial modernisation and the colonising culture of McWorld. P6

While Younge is at pains throughout his work to emphasise the importance of respecting difference, he never for one moment loses track of our common universal humanity:

At root lies the deeply radical notion that those various ways in which we are distinct are dwarfed by the essential facts of our commonality. But to evoke universal humanism also throws down the gauntlet to the Pan-Africanist, the Islamist, Zionist, patriot, radical feminist, and others, to reach beyond their immediate terms of reference and make common cause on the basis of a common bond our humanity. P8

Stressing the point, Younge adds for good measure:

Human rights are either universal or they are meaningless. P9

Then in a broadside aimed at the traditional Marxist left who all too often dismiss the significance of difference, Younge has this to say:

For others on the left, the journey into the more vague area of (group) identity marks so great a departure from the hallowed class struggle that they are simply unable to take it seriously. Orthodox Marxists believe anyone who has been distracted by the fickle matters of gender, region, ethnicity, race, religion anything that cannot be reduced to the relations of production has essentially been duped. P11

Guilty as charged, and even though my orthodox Marxist days are some way behind me (whatever orthodoxy is meant to imply) I still have much sympathy with that so called orthodox position, and yes I do think it is all too easy to be duped by the separatist mongers, or as Karl Marx might say, beware of those peddling a ‘false consciousness’. But I have no argument with Younge when he puts the matter this way:

There is nothing inherent in any identity, or the politics that emerge from it, that makes it necessarily either reactionary or progressive. The issue is whether those who seek to rally those (particular) groups are campaigning for rights that should be exclusive or universal.P13

Seeking to rebuke those who refuse to recognise the importance of individual and group identities, Younge elaborates:

Mistaking freedom of thought and action for abstraction and detachment, those who claim they are not influenced by perspectives inherited though their various identities essentially believe that by will alone they can declare unilateral independence from this world and create a new one in which their lives make sense only in complete isolation. Unshaped by time and unmoved by place, they insist that their thoughts, unfettered by background or circumstance, are theirs alone. They must assume that, had they been born a girl in India or a boy in the eighteenth century, their world view would be exactly the same. But follow that logic, and you are left with a person who lives outwith history, geography or civilization. And those people simply do not exist. P46

A very persuasive argument but in some respects I fear that Younge is creating the proverbial hollow man all the easier to knock him down. Yes indeed, we are all products of our circumstances and only a utopian fool would seek to totally discount his or hers, but it is possible, with strength of will and a more powerful ideology than that offered by group identity, to rise above the particular and see oneself as a citizen of the world. ‘You may say that I’m a dreamer’, as John Lennon would have it, but even the most bazaar of dreams are ultimately rooted in material reality. As each day passes our material conditions dictate a more global consciousness and that I think, despite the outer trappings of McWorld and Co, is a good thing.

Gary Younge has produced a cutting edge text that, with every bomb that explodes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or, closer to home, in the Basque territory, becomes that much more relevant. The proposed banning of the full burka by a number of Western European countries brings into full focus the paradoxes of conflicting identities. In his concluding chapter, Younge poses this vexed question within the real context of power and the struggle for resources. Whatever differences I may have with Younge are merely ones of nuance and emphasis. On the key issue of identity and power I fully accord with his no nonsense summation.

Identities are rooted in material circumstances. In certain circumstances, whether you are British, black, gay, Iraqi, Hindu or female can be the difference between life and death, poverty and wealth, citizenship and statelessness. Power, resources, and opportunity are in play in how we chose to understand or misunderstand the value of ourselves and others.

It is difficult to talk seriously about our common humanity when large sections of the planet live in sub-human conditions. With almost half the world’s population living on less than $2 a day, in the West, issues such as immigration, trade, foreign policy, asylum, aid and development become questions of whether you think a large proportion of the South is worthy of clean drinking water, basic education, health care and basic human rights and what should happen if they come to your door looking for them. P229

Expressed in such stark terms, it is little wonder that billions of people on the planet were desperately hoping that Ghana, as a representative of the world’s disposed, would triumph in the sporting arena. Today, more than ever, global poverty faces global corporate sport and all that goes with it, with uncompromising defiance. This defiance takes many forms; national, regional, religious. But whatever the form, the root causes of this clash of identities has been clearly articulated by Gary Younge. Something will have to give.