I just read this story about a town in Georgia that is forbidding the playing of Soccer in the town park claiming that only Baseball and Football can be played there. The article is really about how Toronto should take a hard look at the success of multiculturalism in what was once a very white city.
Perhaps it's because I am a product of Toronto but if this story is as true as reported I am dumbfounded. How, in this day and age, can people seriously think that taking an action like this is OK?
I can understand the fear of change that can permeate a place that has likely not changed in a long time. I remember the growing pains of Toronto in the 70s. The term Paki was generally tossed about by the ignorant, as in Paki Go Home. But even then, the battle lines would not have sought to punish a group of ball-kicking kids.
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Southern Man vs. Fugees
At first glance you could file this next story with those comic tales Canadians like to share about how weird and out-of-whack America can get — like calling french fries “freedom fries” — but the more you read about this the more complicated it becomes. There are a bunch of kids on a soccer team called The Fugees who are struggling to be allowed to play their sport in Clarkston, Georgia because the tension over immigration and refugees is pouring out into the public parks of this town. The NY Times has a good long article about all this (be sure check out the multi-media section too):
Early last summer the mayor of this small town east of Atlanta issued a decree: no more soccer in the town park.
“There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.”
In Clarkston, soccer means something different than in most places. As many as half the residents are refugees from war-torn countries around the world. Placed by resettlement agencies in a once mostly white town, they receive 90 days of assistance from the government and then are left to fend for themselves. Soccer is their game.
But to many longtime residents, soccer is a sign of unwanted change, as unfamiliar and threatening as the hijabs worn by the Muslim women in town. It’s not football. It’s not baseball. The fields weren’t made for it. Mayor Swaney even has a name for the sort of folks who play the game: the soccer people.
Caught in the middle is a boys soccer program called the Fugees — short for refugees, though most opponents guess the name refers to the hip-hop band. In 2002 I was at some kind of Film or TV industry conference here in Toronto, the name, purpose and why I was there I have long forgotten, but I remember one thing an American speaker said when asked how Canadian content could be successful in the U.S. (paraphrased via 4 year deteriorating memory): “Toronto should export what it’s doing here. You should tell stories about the stuff you might take for granted, but that a lot of other places can’t seem to pull off without conflict.” He was of course talking about this city’s multiculturalism.
Since then, when a story like this one comes up, I wonder if there is a way to do just that. And do it while not pretending there aren’t actual and real problems in Toronto, and without coming off as too earnest or overly-Pollyanna like our city’s motto: “Diversity - our - strength.” Though maybe being completely earnest is the way to go, and the motto’s fine. Either way, maybe people worried about how World Class Toronto is should stop fretting about failed World’s Fair bids and look at this stuff we do better than most places. How is it that an uptight, WASP fortress like Toronto was up to the 1950s, where the Jews weren’t even allowed to work at Eatons, could get over all that and become what it is today, so quickly and without such conflict?
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