From the Washington Post:
CORRECTION
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this piece “Why doesn’t Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?” 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.
Even without any obviously black players, Argentina and Lionel Messi advanced to the World Cup finals today, beating Croatia 3-0.
Well, that’s not that significant but let’s do the math. Say that
But roughly 200,000 African captives disembarked on the shores of the Río de la Plata during Argentina’s colonial period, and, by the end of the 18th century, one-third of the population was Black.
Today, a little less than 4% of the genes of the 47 million people in Argentina are of sub-Saharan ancestry, or the equivalent of 1.7 million people or 8.5 times the number of slaves imported.
In contrast, in the USA according to Henry Louis Gates, 388,000 slaves were imported, about twice as many as to Argentina. These days, 40 million identify as African Americans. Let’s say that 80% of those are pre-1865 non-immigrant descendants of American slaves or 32 million and 80% of their ancestry is sub-Saharan or the equivalent of 25.6 million full Africans from the slave era. But only 0.388 million were disembarked, so they’ve expanded 66 times since importation, or a rate of population growth about 8 times greater than in Argentina.
In other words, white Americans were, relative to the rest of the world, really nice to black Africans as measured by the bottom line number of population expansion.
That would seem to help explain why African-Americans are, by far, the most famous Africans in the world.
But, shhhh, don’t tell anybody, they don’t want to hear it.
