The shocking headline appeared all over the country last week: “Wild brawl ends Georgetown’s exhibition game in China early.” Some combination of the words China, Georgetown, and brawl appeared in each of the numerous emails, Facebook messages, and tweets I received this summer from friends and family eager to break the news to their Georgetown friend about our basketball team’s on-court battle with their Chinese counterparts. Their descriptions—spectators hurling chairs and water bottles, players throwing punches at their opponents, and foul play all around—portrayed scenes of utter chaos on the court. The incident, which unfortunately coincided with Vice President Biden’s visit to China, was labeled by many major news agencies as a diplomatic disaster.
Like many Hoyas, I applaud the University’s effort to forge cross-cultural relationships through sports. As a dual citizen of both the U.S. and the U.K., I chose to come to Georgetown because of both its international presence and diversity initiatives. Georgetown seemed like a place that championed multiculturalism, a phenomenon that many Europeans consider to be one of the biggest, and most important, experiments of our time.
Sports have often been used in the past to facilitate an ethic of multiculturalism and act as a vehicle for diplomacy—the Olympics are a perfect example of this—and with that in mind, the game’s outcome was surely disappointing. But after all of the extensive media coverage, I found myself disconcerted by the tendency to pin political meaning on a basketball scuffle that most likely occurred because of disagreement with the referee, not as the result of some kind of clash of ideology. It was as if the game had become a microcosm for the future of U.S.-China relations, and the fate of this doomed relationship was available for all of us to watch on YouTube in slow motion within the theatrical arena of a basketball court. Would there have been the same media reaction if the team had been playing Sweden or France?
There’s a danger in viewing events as the result of political, racial, or cultural disputes when the conflict in question is not inherently of this nature. The basketball game did not end up being the goodwill game it was intended to be, but neither was it indicative of some kind of U.S.-China incompatibility factor. Like the Georgetown basketball debacle, the London riots this summer caused many to decry multiculturalism as a massive failure. Casting events as some kind of clash of cultures has been used repeatedly in Europe to reinforce the all too common belief that multiculturalism has failed. For example, the London riots were rapidly labeled as racially motivated violence, with some news agencies even comparing the disturbances to the civil rights movement. This comparison is absurd. It later became clear that the riots had more in common with opportunistic looting, and were not confined to a particular racial or ethnic demographic. To see the riots as the result of racial conflict is to ignore the larger problem that in Great Britain there is a large contingent of young people who feel they have no stake in either their own future or that of their country.
Slapping a label on a conflict is often the easiest thing to do. It would be simple to say that London’s youth were rioting because they cannot stand white people, or that the fight between the Georgetown Hoyas and the Bayi Rockets erupted due to longstanding tensions between American and Chinese ideologies. Both of these descriptions, however, would be wildly inaccurate. Citing the failure of multiculturalism has become a means through which politicians, the media, and everyday citizens avoid addressing or explaining the real problem, whatever it may be.
Imbuing a conflict with racial, ethnic, or religious significance often misses the point of the conflict. It readily lends support to the idea that there are some aspects of one’s identity that will put one at odds with another person of a different race, religion, or belief system. While many conflicts exist as the result of tensions between different groups, a lot of disagreements have more nuanced explanations that are not as simple as race or religion. The capacity for conflict resolution—for both a fruitful U.S.-China relationship and peace in the London streets—depends on accepting multiculturalism as a viable way of life, and diversity as something we strive for in society.
