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France Vs Argentina: Why I’ll Be Rooting For Les Bleus…
Despite the ugly and complicated history.
It all comes down to this.
After 63 games, with countless goals, heartbreaks, shocks and everything else in between, the winner of this edition of the world cup will be decided between the French national team known as Les Bleus (The Blues) and the Argentinian national team known as the Albacetes.
To the uninitiated and unconcerned, it’s only a football match, with 22 men chasing after a round object. But to the rest of us, this is so much more than kicking and running after the football.
It is about politics and as they say, politics affects everything.
And today’s match between the French and the Argentinians is as political as it gets.
Why I hear you ask?
If you said to most folks that Argentina once had a large Black population, you’d be looked at with a degree of incredulity.
But it did.
Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, Argentina pursued a deliberate policy of large scale immigration from Europe and the Middle-East to whiten its population.
While it is fair to also point out that they weren’t the only ones actively pursuing this policy (Brazil, Peru, Ecuador…