Joel Embiid’s decision to play for USA and not Cameroon has no room for criticism

The 2024 Paris Olympics will be a big one for the U.S. men’s national basketball team. After years of hearing “the world is catching up” and a year after a dismal fourth-place finish at the FIBA ​​World Cup, the U.S. is eager to prove that they are still the best team in the world at basketball, and that when they field their best players, no one can match the U.S. national team.

At the center of world basketball debate in Paris is Joel Embiid’s choice to represent the United States in the Olympics. The Cameroonian native, who moved to the United States at age 16, has been heavily criticized on social media, with some highly followed accounts calling Embiid’s decision “taking the easy way out.”

Does this mean anything? Is it fair to classify Embiid as a medal contender? No, and again, he’s not.

Comparing Joel Embiid to Jose Alvarado is really interesting.

The tweet, which has been liked more than 35,000 times and shared nearly 4,000 times, cast Jose Alvarado as a paragon of virtue who had pulled Puerto Rico up the ranks, while Embiid was simply accepting the position he was given on the team.

The problem is, Alvarado wasn’t born in Puerto Rico — he was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens — and didn’t accept an invitation to join Puerto Rico until he was actively recruited by national team coach Carlos Delfino in 2022.

Alvarado has Puerto Rican ancestry through his father, but he has no ties to the country until he is actively approached by a team to play for him in 2022. Of course, this doesn’t really matter at all, because…

Nationality and ethnicity are social constructs

Anthropologists and sociologists agree on this point in peer-reviewed journals. Early 1960sThe essential argument is that geopolitics and colonialism do not fundamentally affect which ethnic group or nationality one belongs to.

This was especially evident during the more overt colonial periods when nations were under more overt foreign occupation and rule, such as British rule in India, Dutch rule in South Africa, and the Eastern Bloc countries that were part of the Soviet Union.

In these cases, native or indigenous peoples were rarely socially, culturally or anthropologically identified with the occupiers, leading to a view of an individual’s identity as being far more important than their ethnicity or nationality than simply where they were born.

Now, Embiid might be considered a more extreme case because he didn’t move to the U.S. until he was 16, but sociologically that doesn’t matter. He chose to live in the U.S. his entire adult life, raise his kids here, and in two years’ time will have spent more time in the U.S. than he did in Cameroon. If he personally identifies as “American,” then that’s all that matters.

The history of Olympic basketball is filled with examples far more extreme than Joel Embiid.

What makes Embiid’s story even more remarkable is the global courtship of sorts, with Cameroon, the United States and France all potential teams for Embiid to play in. The driving force behind the anger is not Cameroon (which never made it to the Olympics in the first place) but France, which feels rejected by Embiid. When he was given French citizenship and expected to play for the host countryHowever, he changed his mind and joined the U.S. national team.

The bottom line is that we have a 30-year-old NBA MVP who many countries covet despite the fact that his country of birth did not qualify for the Olympics. There have been some frankly laughable instances in the past where players have represented other countries in the Olympics because their country of birth did not qualify for the Olympics, they did not have a chance to make the U.S. team, or they thought they would have a better chance of winning a medal by playing for another country.

• In 2008, Chris Kaman (then with the Los Angeles Clippers) became a German citizen just before the Beijing Olympics and played alongside Dirk Nowitzki. Kaman was born in Michigan, neither of his parents were born in Germany, and his only connection to Germany was through his great-grandmother. Kaman played for Germany in the Olympics despite not speaking any German.
• Serge Ibaka played for Spain at the London Olympics in 2012. Ibaka was born in the People’s Republic of Congo and lived there until he was 18, where he began his basketball career. He played in Spain from age 18 to 22 before entering the NBA draft, and chose to take Spanish citizenship because he liked it so much.
• Jahlil Okafor played for Nigeria in the 2020 Olympics. Born in Arkansas and raised in Chicago, Okafor played for the U.S. national team as a junior from 2010 to 2013. After moving on to the NBA and realizing he wasn’t good enough to make the senior U.S. national team, he decided to play for Nigeria in Tokyo.

All of these players were mid-level players, not elite NBA stars, so they were deemed okay, but the fundamental fact remains that when it comes to the Olympics, people have always chosen their nationality.

This is Embiid’s chance to win. something

Joel Embiid’s basketball future is unclear. Sixers The addition of Paul George will put them back in contention for an NBA championship, something that has been the case for most of Embiid’s career. Philadelphia has often failed to live up to expectations, and now, with injuries rearing their ugly head and Embiid turning 30, the Paris Olympics could very well be their best chance to win a major team award in basketball.

It would be foolish to criticize Embiid for not representing Cameroon. Ethnicity and nationality are personal decisions and should not be defined by geographical boundaries. was When it comes to the Olympics, there is an established history of athletes competing on behalf of other countries.

Ultimately, Mbiid is free to play wherever he wants in the Olympics, and he had a long process to decide where he wants to play, but it’s not for us to decide if he’s a fit for Team USA. That’s for Mbiid and the selection committee to decide, and they’ve made that decision.