Double Life – Colors

By Daniela Fubini*

The World Cup is over and the summer can start now, finally. It’s too bad the Cup didn’t go to Croatia, the typical underdog who collected fans all around the globe by ending up in a finale with an overwhelmingly lucky France who cannot be anyone’s underdog but had instead the charm of an extreme melting pop displayed on the field.

On this side of the Mediterranean, where the migrations emergency exists only in the news reports about yet another boat full of desperate people that didn’t receive permission to shore on Italian territory, a high percentage of players holding quite proudly a not too white shade of skin is just a fact. We tend to be less fussy when it comes to these topics and focus on what works and what doesn’t to get eventually the prize.

Over this World cup, several teams put a wide variety of skin colours on the field: they were mainly the old Europe former colonialists like England, Belgium and France itself. Did the different shades of brown make a difference in the success of the teams? Well, all the three here above got to semi-final.

This reminds me of a very wise person who told me once that whether we are ready or not to accept it, in a x number of generations all the humanity will have a skin color between the bright white of the north of Europe and the darkest brown of central Africa: somewhere around a light version of Nutella, she added. The World cup shows that many shades of color can make a very good team, so I guess the prophecy of the Nutella is not too far from us.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Israel, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.