They Want the Body. They Have Never Wanted the Humanity.

Five billion people will watch some part of this World Cup. Most of them will see a game. What I see is the oldest arrangement in the modern world, running in broad daylight on the biggest stage there is: take the Black body, take the Black talent, and leave the Black humanity at the gate. Let me show you what I mean.

On July 1, Folarin Balogun — the leading scorer for the United States at this World Cup — stepped on a Bosnian defender’s ankle and got sent off. Straight red. Automatic one-match ban. That’s the rule. It has always been the rule. Then the President of the United States picked up the phone, called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, and asked him to take another look. FIFA took another look. The ban was suspended. Balogun started against Belgium four days later. Trump went to a press conference and took the credit. UEFA called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” Belgium’s federation said it was astonished. In the entire history of the World Cup, a red card has been overturned exactly twice — Balogun, and Garrincha in 1962.

So now let me tell you who Folarin Balogun is. He is the son of two Nigerian parents who were living in London. In 2001, his mother Florence was seven months pregnant and visiting New York when the airline refused to let her board the flight home. So she stayed with relatives in Brooklyn, and she had her baby there. A few weeks later, the family flew back to England, where the boy grew up. That’s the whole story. Folarin Balogun is an American because an airline agent said no.

Which makes him, precisely, the kind of American this administration has spent its entire second term telling you is not really an American. An anchor baby. A birth-tourism loophole. The living thing that the executive order on birthright citizenship was written to erase. And the same man who signed that order got on the phone to make sure the boy could play on Monday night.

So let’s call it what it is: the same trade that was struck in the hold of a ship, and it has never once been renegotiated. They want the body. They want what the body can do — how fast it runs, how high it jumps, how many it puts in the back of the net. They do not want the person living inside it. Slavery was the purest expression of that arrangement, and damn near every institution built on top of it has kept a copy of the receipt. Including the beautiful game.

And I am not writing this from the press box. I was born in Nigeria. I’m an American citizen. And in the same season that this country moved heaven and earth to get one Nigerian’s son onto a soccer field, it ran Operation Metro Surge through the Somali neighborhoods of Minneapolis — a community the President had already called “garbage.” Somali Minnesotans, nearly 58% of whom were born in this country, started carrying their passports to the grocery store. In Springfield, Ohio, the Supreme Court cleared the way to strip legal status from Haitians who had spent years working and paying taxes in a city where more than a thousand of their children were born American. And on July 9, the Department of Homeland Security published the names and photographs of 124 Nigerians it intends to deport, under a banner calling them the worst of the worst. MY people. Names that sound like my name. Names that sound like Balogun.

And some of the people this country has expelled were not even sent home. At least 60 have been shipped to Ghana under a third-country deal, and some of them were then dumped over the border in Togo without documents — put out in a country they are not from, where they may not speak the language, where nobody is expecting them. So: a phone call for the striker. A list for his cousins.

Now, the defense. You will be told that none of this is racism — it’s patriotism. The President was just backing an American player, the way any president would. The fan in the stands was just heckling, the way fans do. Sport and politics are separate. It’s a few bad apples. Simmer down.

Then the numbers tell on them. Operation Metro Surge was sold to this country as a crackdown on fraud in the Somali community. Federal data later showed it produced at least 3,789 arrests — and only 106 of those people, fewer than 3%, were Somali. Not one of them was connected to the fraud that was the entire stated justification for the operation. Two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents in the course of it. Roughly 35% of the arrests were collateral — people swept up off the street who weren’t the target of anything. So what was it for? You do not send 3,000 armed agents into a Black immigrant neighborhood, come back holding almost nobody you said you were hunting, and call that enforcement. Call it what it was. It was a message. And it was received in every Somali kitchen in Minneapolis, by citizens, about whether this country was ever theirs. Bad apples don’t move like that. Bad apples don’t get a phone call from the Oval Office.

And it isn’t only the state — the stands are running the same play. On July 3 in Miami, IShowSpeed, a young Black American streamer whose entire brand is built on the idea that people everywhere have more in common than not, was livestreaming Argentina against Cabo Verde when a fan leaned over the railing and told him, in Spanish, to go cry at the zoo. Four days later in Atlanta, at Argentina-Egypt, a fan made a monkey gesture at him on his own stream. FIFA condemned it. FIFA opened an investigation. FIFA said the World Cup is a celebration of unity, diversity and respect.

Here’s what FIFA also did. In that same Argentina-Egypt match, Egypt’s head coach Hossam Hassan crossed his arms into an X — FIFA’s own official anti-racism signal, the one FIFA created and told the world it would honor, the one that is supposed to force a referee to stop the match. The referee did not stop the match. He booked Hassan and played on. There is a real dispute about what Hassan was signaling — Egyptian reporting says he had just been told what a section of the crowd was chanting; others say he was protesting the officiating. Fine. Have that argument. But notice that nobody in a position of authority stopped to ask him. The protocol went unused in the one moment a Black African coach reached for it, and the man who reached got a yellow card for his trouble. This is the same FIFA that quietly cancelled its own anti-racism campaign at the Club World Cup on American soil last year.

Look across the game and the pattern holds. Europe has spent two decades hardening its heart toward Black immigrants while fielding national teams stocked with Black immigrants and the children of Black immigrants. France rides Kylian Mbappe deep into the knockout rounds, and a Paraguayan senator calls him a “colonized Cameroonian” the moment his penalty knocks her country out. The Netherlands lose on penalties to Morocco, and Kluivert, Timber and Summerville — the three who missed — get buried in racist abuse online before the players are off the pitch. Vinicius Junior has absorbed roughly twenty documented racist incidents in eight years in Spain, up to and including an effigy of him hung from a bridge. FIFA’s own monitoring service pulled 530,000 abusive posts in the opening weeks of this tournament — nearly double what it removed across the entire 2022 World Cup, and it isn’t finished. Fly the flag when he scores. Send the monkey when he misses. Same fans. Same week.

So here is what I want to leave you with, and it applies the same whether you’re a president, a political party, a federation, or a grown man in a replica jersey in section 118: you do not get to have this both ways. You cannot claim the goal and disown the man. You cannot need the Cameroonian in the ninetieth minute and want the Cameroonian gone by Monday morning. You cannot call a young man a countryman when he’s up 2-0 and call him an invasion when he’s in line at the immigration office. That is not patriotism and it is not fandom. It’s the same ledger they’ve always kept, with better branding — and everybody sitting on the wrong side of it can read it just fine.

Folarin Balogun’s citizenship was real enough to change a World Cup match. It ought to be real enough to protect his cousins. Either the humanity travels with the talent, or the whole thing was always a lie. Five billion people are watching. Let them see it.

We don’t duck the hard conversations on the show — we sit in them. If you want more of this, the receipts and the honesty without the shouting, come build with us. Become part of the family at intheblackpdcst.com/become-family.

In The Black Podcast — Informed. Intelligent. In The Black.