The World Cup is causing millions of White Americans to realize in real time how much a country founded on our supposed supremacy has taken from us: culture, tradition, community, connectivity, expression, language, joy.
Deep down every claim to supremacy, to exceptionalism, is fueled by the anxiety that that claim is wrong. The World Cup is showing millions of White Americans that not only have we been, and participated in being, led astray by a lie, but that being with and being among and of, is infinitely more joyous, fulfilling and liberating than being above could ever be. No amount of capital accumulation and no amount of war could ever give us even a fraction of this.
Contemporary public discourse often asserts the American dream as being unequally attainable or no longer achievable at all, or maybe even a lie, but the American dream was never about the chance to “make it” in a material sense. The American dream was just that: a dream. In exchange for what makes us most human, we were offered the chance to live inside a power fantasy.
The term “melting pot” was not used to celebrate American multiculturalism as it is often remembered. It was used to celebrate cultural erasure. Israel Zangwill coined the term in describing America as a crucible where “all the races of Europe are melting and reforming . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians . . . God is making the American!” An identity which required cultural loss and subscribing to violence against a racialized “other.”
The World Cup is showing millions of White Americans a glimpse of what was lost. Millions are being shown that real beauty, real culture, real joy comes from being with the people, among and of the people and not as a people existing in opposition to.... an oppositionality which we came to believe was the source of our “superiority,” our “power” when in fact it has always been the source of our misery.
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