AMERICAN THINKER - Monica Showalter - DEC 13, 2022
The Washington Post ran what it must have thought was the standard wokester argument like the rest of them, upbraiding Argentina in an op-ed for not having enough black soccer players on its national team in the World Cup.
"Why doesn’t Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?" the headline read, leading to an op-ed by some El Paso wokester professor who apparently doesn't know much about Argentina, whose capital is 5,534 miles away from El Paso. The Post's vaunted fact-checkers didn't seem to know much, either.
Suffice to say, it didn't go well for the Post.
The Argentines responded with fury at the sorry woman's sheer ignorance of their country (GatewayPundit has some choice replies), and the Post had to run an embarrassing correction.
According to Fox News:
The Washington Post was forced to issue a correction to an opinion piece that highlighted the lack of Black players on Argentina's World Cup squad.
Argentina scored a spot in the tournament's semifinal after defeating the Netherlands in a penalty shootout in Friday's wild matchup. In her Washington Post opinion piece, Erika Denise Edwards, an associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, shared her critique on the racial makeup of the team.
"Why doesn't Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?" the headline for Edwards' piece asked, with the subtitle, "Argentina is far more diverse than many people realize — but the myth that it is a White nation has persisted."
She encouraged her Twitter followers to read her piece with the preview, "A history of Black erasure in Argentina!! Check out my article!"
What else could it be but those dirty racists again?
The team, of course, is winning, having made the semifinals and about to undertake a match with Croatia today, (more dirty racists for another day).
For the Post, that must have made it the right sort of argument to make right now.
"Black erasure in Argentina helps explain its World Cup team," reads the still visible subhed at the favicon at the top of the Washington Post's tab, which is quite a charge to make.
The amazing thing here is that nobody seems to know much about Argentina in this sorry drama, and the editors, at least, cannot do math.
Start with the correction itself:
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this piece noted that roughly one percent of the Argentinian population was Black according to a 2010 government released census. While the number of Black people cited was accurate, the percentage was actually far less than one percent and the piece has been amended to state that.
They, ummm, didn't know how to do percentages.
Argentina does indeed have a black population -- and it's very, very, small, far less than 1% of the population that was originally claimed in the piece that we were supposed to be so outraged about. Perhaps that would explain the absence of black soccer players, who, in the Post's view, are all natural athletes being discriminated against on this team that badly wants to win, to note the implied stereotype from that argument.
It gets worse.
Argentina did indeed once have a large black population in the mid-19th century with about a third of the country black people.
Here's the problem: The entire population was very, very, small.
Immigration was encouraged just to fill the country out and since the country was booming, eventually becoming one of the richest in the world before Juan Peron turned up and introduced Joe Biden-style corporate state fascism, and decline, so the place was a magnet comparable to the U.S. for immigrants, attracting about as many as the U.S. did during the mid- and late 19th century. That all by itself diluted the black population.
Argentina was like Venezuela until Hugo Chavez came along, attracting tens of thousands of immigrants from all over (former President Carlos Menem's ancestor came from Syria), but mainly from Spain and Italy. Over in the states, Spaniards and Italians incidentally were not considered "white" among the establishment at the time, but Argentines didn't care.
I've been to Buenos Aires, and having visited the famous Recoleta cemetery, was fascinated at how blacks, whites, Arabs, people of all colors, Jews, Catholics, other Christians, freemasons, are all buried there side by side, which gives you the flavor of the place at the time. It wasn't like the states, where segregation defined the social stratification in the tony establishments. It resembled more closely the Wild West where people were so scarce, their color and religion weren't important.
In Argentina, they were all mixed in, nobody paid attention to color or religion, and they grew prosperous as heck. "As rich as an Argentine," so the saying went in the states at the time.
Which brings us to the last point nobody's brought up except for one of the Argentine commentators featured on GatewayPundit's site.
What happened to the black people? Were they killed off or chased out as Italians and Spaniards emigrated in?
Nope. Several year ago, scholars did a DNA study about this and found that white Argentines ... married them.
That news actually ran in the Washington Post back in 2005:
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Their disappearance is one of Argentina's most enduring mysteries. In 1810, black residents accounted for about 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires. By 1887, however, their numbers had plummeted to 1.8 percent. So where did they go? The answer, it turns out, is nowhere. Popular myth has offered two historical hypotheses: a yellow-fever epidemic in 1871 that devastated black urban neighborhoods, and a brutal war with Paraguay in the 1860s that put many black Argentines on the front lines. But two new studies are challenging those old notions, using distinct methods: a door-to-door census to determine how many Argentines consider themselves black, and an analysis of DNA samples to detect traces of African ancestry in those who consider themselves white. The results are only partially compiled, but they suggest that many of the black Argentines did not vanish; they just faded into the mixed-race populace and became lost to demography. According to some researchers, as many as 10 percent of Buenos Aires residents are partly descended from black Argentines but have no idea.
So they not only don't know how to do math over at the Post among its vaunted editing team, they don't read their own paper, either. Nobody fact-checked this clown from El Paso who doesn't know a whole lot about her own subject.
That's embarrassing stuff. Now the truth is out -- Argentine whites married Argentine blacks and the result is Argentina today with the nice soccer team.
You'd think the Post would know that, but they didn't. They just take any old piece from any wokester professor provided the argument is woke enough on racism and reparations in the U.S. Jim Crow South context. Not surprisingly, they got smacked down by the locals who know their own country much better than these projectors projecting the leftist "narrative" onto them.
The Washington Post spends oodles of cash on foreign correspondents presumably to get the actual story of what goes on in the far-flung places in the world. Well, that was money wasted, since all they do now is serve as an echo chamber for ignorant wokesters.
How very embarrassing.