It’s an interesting point, but for the Patriots, many have had family living in the US for several generations and are specifically referred to at at times as African-American. Both identities.
In the US, especially if your family recently immigrated to the US, you maintain that as part of your identity.
Hell, in Pennsylvania, we still have people who Pennsylvania Dutch. These people have been here since the 1700’s or so, but still maintain their language to a degree.
It would be cool if it weren’t for the fact that they are all from Germany.
As for France, specifically, many of the team members are second generation, which is not the case for the New England Patriots. Also, as I mentioned, since France refuses to consider race or measure it, it is easy for racism to flourish because they won’t acknowledge that it’s a problem.
Are we trying to say that saying “Africa won the world cup” after France won is not racist?
Because it’s racist as hell, at least looking at it from an European perspective. It’s exactly the kind of joke an European racist would say (and it’s not an uncommon one, things like that can be heard here and there as racist outbursts).
Edit: my interpretation is that identity around here is more based on country of origin, language and citizenship than on skin color. Due to intra-european immigration, a lot of the xenophobia is focused towards racially undistinguishable individuals that speak “weird” (although race plays a part in making it easier to identify strangers, but a non-white person with spotless accent will trigger less racist behaviours that a white foreigner from certain countries). Forcing a foreign identity on somebody is akin (on the xenophobic mind) to rejecting their local identity and sorthand for telling them to “go back to where they belong”.
It sounds really, really bad.
I can see how it might be different in the US, but in the EU, it’s like this. An ambassador has to be offended by such remarks.
His use of accent also feels racist from an European perspective. Not saying that he his, but that there’s a cultural divide. I think the ambassador letter is a little bit long-winded, but spot on.
Indeed. It was a sneering anglo caricature of the French.
It’s not like Trevor doesn’t have a point about the legacy of French colonialism and the failings of French integrationism, but he came across as more interested in sneering at the French, as if the fact that the French are racist was well established, and The Daily Show is a place liberals can come together to sneer at the racist French.
It’s a show for an American audience and Trevor has a South African POV, so, I don’t quite get why the Ambassador had to comment. Still, when your joke could’ve been given by a LePen at a far right rally…
Which isn’t what the French are disputing. The fact is that racism in France in a large part manifests as people thinking that Black / Muslim / whatever aren’t truly French. Not really.
So, for Noah to make a joke that it wasn’t really the French team that won the Cup, it was the Africa team, well, I’m sure many a FN voter would agree.
In my experience with various French people, this kind of thing absolutely is a thing. Hell, a bunch of Parisians don’t even think folks in southern France are really French.
France, historically, has had a weirdly (at least to me as an American) institutionalized xenophobia, going as far as to try and legislate a motion of cultural purity. Saying you can’t wear any kind of religious attire, despite having Catholic practices directly endorsed by the government… Or trying to having official government policies to try and prevent "pollution"of their language by words from other languages.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with the French for years, and have French friends… But they also have noted this weird aspect of French society to me.
The Spanish also have a prestigious and respected royal academy to preserve the Spanish language, and dictate what is and isn’t correct Spanish.
Actually Britain is quite unusual in not having an established body like this, although Oxford and Cambridge do come close when they compile which words are new, which are more popular than before and which are declining, which have changed meaning (gay!)
Ditto the various American corpuses (corpii? ) like merriment Webster (iirc. On phone in public. Won’t Google )
Edit: regarding France, I think there is a bit of legacy from napoleon. His levee en masse smashed all the disparate parts of France and centralised alot of government and culture.
I’m leaning Spanish now (for reasons) and there definitely is a Real Academia, but in practice it seems to have slowly adopted most of the differences in the versions of Spanish spoken in Latin America. So in theory it preserves the language, while in practice it constantly expands it so as to be inclusive.
The Spanish academy does uphold the language as its currently used, mostly in Latin America. It does not impose but record the use of the language and change it’s rulings as the use changes.
Saying that it does dictate is a huge misunderstanding of it´s function.
See the case where recently they accepted the ‘ in some adverbs and pronouns was not the norm anymore (huge deal, sort of saying using it’s as a possessive in English is ok because, well, people do use it frequently).
Yeah, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española has gone in a descriptive direction rather than a prescriptive one, which is fine to a point. Myself, I strongly object to their inclusion of that horrible neologism “interviuvar” for “to interview” WHEN THERE IS A PERFECTLY GOOD VERB THAT IS LINGUISTICALLY ANALOGOUS IN SPANISH AND HAS BEEN AROUND FOREVER, namely “entrevistar” GRRRRR.
For French, the weird thing to me was the government’s refusal to accept new words for things that were new. You saw it in trying to fight against the term e-mail, or CD, instead saying that your should use the full French translation “mail electronique” or “disque compactique”. It was just dumb.
The Diccionario is not the big deal (after all people do use the words they understand). The Gramática is much more telling in how the use of the language is changing and how it’s being accepted “officially”.
Do they also publish an Ortografía… ? Because I’m also not thrilled about how nowadays demonstrative pronouns are losing the written accent to distinguish them from demonstrative adjectives.
Demonstrative adjective: Esas palabras tan dulces, puede que sean sinceras… (a lyric from an old Trío los Panchos song)
Demonstrative pronoun: Sus palabras no fueron ésas. <–that written accent is being lost.
