This may interest only me, as an immigrant's kid, but I'm intrigued by how many of the kids on this roster were either foreign-born or the sons of immigrants themselves. Soccer in this country has always been heavily influenced by players who were foreign-born or the sons of people who were. But this roster seemed particularly so. PLAYERS ON THE US U23 OLYMPIC QUALIFYING ROSTER WHO WERE BORN ABROAD OR TO A FOREIGN-BORN PARENT Freddy Adu – born in Ghana Juan Agudelo – born in Colombia Terrence Boyd – born in Germany; American dad Teal Bunbury – born in Canada; American mom; father born in Guyana Joe Benny Corona – Mexican dad; El Salvadoran mom Mikkel Diskerud – born in Norway; American mom Joe Gyau – n/a Bill Hamid – Sierra Leonean father Jared Jeffrey – n/a Sean Johnson – Jamaican parents Perry Kitchen – n/a Amobi Okugo – Nigerian parents Ike Opara – Nigerian parents Kofi Sarkodie – Ghanaian parents Brek Shea – n/a Michael Stephens – n/a Tony Taylor – Panamanian parents Zarek Valentin – Puerto Rican father Jorge Villafana – Mexican parents Sheanon Williams – Trinidadian parents Feel free to note any corrections or omissions. A couple of notes: I only noted the parents I could confirm were foreign born. A New York Times report says Valentin's mother is German but I could find no other claim to document that. Gyau's grandfather is Ghanaian but his parents both appear to be US-born.
I love how this team does show our country's great diversity and spirit. I'm very proud of this team and it's player's and their backgrounds.
Yup. Gyau's father was born in the US, but his grandfather was the Ghanaian-born footballer Agyemang Gyau. Dane Brekken Shea is of Norwegian extraction, but I've always assumed that was thru a grandparent. I don't really know...............
Yes, they really are just some Asian kids shy of reflecting pretty much what much of America looks like. I love how they do that. A long way from the perceived stereotype of the sport in America as predominantly lily white. I don't care who ya are, that's funny right there.
Nor is it my experience. I grew up playing in teams loaded with immigrant kids (and the sons of them) from Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. However, as I moved up to the elite travel teams (not that my team was really that elite, but it was "select" and it cost money to travel), the team got whiter and the opponents damn sure did. And college soccer has certainly been very white till very recently. The perception of soccer as lily-white goes part-and-parcel with the whole soccer-mom, orange slices, mini-van, pay-to-play ODP stereotypes.
And we all know sterotypes exist because in some small form they are true. Its changing but that dynamic is still a somewhat entrenched part of the landscape.
For comparison - and to see the stereotype was often based in reality - here's the 1992 US Olympic roster. 1 Brad Friedel 2 Cam Rast 3 Alexi Lalas - Greek father 4 Mike Burns 5 Erik Imler 6 Dario Brose 7 Dante Washington 8 Mike Lapper 9 Steve Snow 10 Claudio Reyna - Argentine father, Portuguese mother 11 Yari Allnutt - born in US but lived in Mexico till age 7 12 Troy Dayak 13 Joe-Max Moore 14 Cobi Jones 15 Zak Ibsen 16 Manny Lagos 17 Mike Huwiler 18 Ian Feuer 19 Chris Henderson 20 Curt Onalfo - born in Brazil to US parents (I may have missed a few foreign-born parents.) Almost all suburban kids, mostly white, far-fewer born abroad or to immigrants' kids.
At our best, we're a nation of mutts. No surprise our teams look this way. However, this is very striking that our team has some many first/second generation citizens on it. Pretty cool still.
Goes to show a lot of the bias in a traditional American household. Gatt's dad refused to believe that soccer was a real sport. Sitting on the couch watching games and kicking the ball around out back are starting points for kids to get interested enough to put the effort in to be good.
Yes I certainly have heard the ODP stereotype. The one time it really hit home was when my team went to a tournament in Minnesota one year and we were sort of merged with a team from Virginia. It was about half and half we had maybe 10 guys and they had 8 or so. Every one of them were the stereotypical stiff uptight middle class suburban white kids, while on our team we had kids whose parents were Ethiopian, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Hispanic etc. We didn't have any problems or anything but we were certainly two different sets of kids from two different cultures. I'm thinking back to my college soccer team (which I didn't play for but occasionally watched) and I can only think of one or two non white kids off the top of my head.
Preston Zimmerman loves American soccer so much that he would never want to take a spot in the US away from another soccer player. http://theshinguardian.com/2010/10/26/as-told-by-preston-zimmerman-part-ii/
I believe that at least one of Shea's parents is Norwegian. That makes 2 Norwegian-descended Americans on the team.
Calling a person "white" is culturally ignorant. It's like calling a person "brown" who is from central/south american culture, a person "red" who is from native american culture, calling a person "yellow" or "oriental" who is from east asia, etc. The list above is quite diverse in terms of origins. But thats niether here nor there, and shouldn't really be a concern of anyone. People who see the race over the individual are the problem.
but white is a race... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_demographics_of_the_United_States#Racial_and_ethnic_categories
The Mexican women's team was started with Mexican Americans who played at American Universities. What about Amy Rodrigues? She still plays for USA?
That reveals more about the ignorance of US culture than it does anything else. A Serbian and a Siberian can both be classified with an Irishman and an Argentinian according to a classification based on skin color. Some El Salvadoreans and Brazlilians may be "brown" to someone who is ignorant of culture, but they're far from equivalent.
Sure, but races are cultural inventions shaped by the knowledge and the ignorance of the culture in question. (So are cultures, by definition.) And for a long time in America, racial categories were pretty blunt, organized around slavery and wars of expansion, and strongly tied to the interests of particular dominant classes. And we live with those legacies today in this country, so saying that "there are a lot of white (or brown or black or whatever) people involved in Activity X" isn't a sign that somebody's "ignorant of culture," it's a sign that somebody's fluent in American culture. The racial categories themselves were and often still are based on pernicious, self-serving nonsense, but they shaped and shape people's lives pretty thoroughly. So to notice that certain player pools end up, say, "whiter" or "browner" than nationwide statistics would suggest isn't "ignorant"--it's just noticing that in this country racial and cultural categories bleed into one another in certain ways and thus shape people's lives in certain ways. Or, encouragingly, that in the case of the U-23s, the categories suggest that race, culture, and national origin aren't nearly as decisive as they once were in shaping people's lives here. Which is nice to see.