Thirteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

This paper analyzes German socio-political discourses on race, class, and national identity by studying the public perceptions of the two Afro-German soccer players Jérôme and Kevin-Prince Boateng. Jérôme and Kevin-Prince Boateng are half-brothers born to a Ghanaian father and two different German mothers. Both Boatengs are German citizens, and both played for German junior national teams – from U17 to U21. Jérôme Boateng ultimately ended up as a star player on the German senior national team, with the 2014 World Cup victory as a major career highlight. Kevin-Prince Boateng, on the other hand, was dismissed from the German U21 national team in 2009 and subsequently chose to play for Ghana’s senior national team. Analyzing the public discourses on these two players illustrates the intersections of race, class, and national identity in German society. The media frequently represented the two brothers as personal opposites. Kevin-Prince Boateng grew up in a poor, working-class district of Berlin, while Jérôme Boateng spent his youth in a middle-class neighborhood of the same city. Until late into his career at Bayern Munich, public discourses constructed Jérôme Boateng as the cool and disciplined guy, the stereotypical “good” German, while Kevin-Prince Boateng was “othered” and presented as the undisciplined ghetto-kid. And while both half-brothers have the same skin color, Jérôme Boateng often performed Whiteness, while Kevin-Prince Boateng is associated with Blackness.