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World Cup 2026: FIFA and the U.S.’s White Supremacist Colonial Partnership is already on Full Display
Black Alliance For Peace
17 Jun 2026
🖨️ Print Article
ICE assault protester

FIFA has shown itself to be a colonial instrument that serves white supremacy and U.S. imperialism. Referees, players, and fans from non-white nations are being harassed, denied entry, and brutalized while FIFA looks away.

Originally published in Black Alliance for Peace.

The World Cup has begun, and we are witnesses to the contradictions of the full, bloody arc of 250 years of U.S. history, manifesting through the state’s partnership with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, FIFA.  In just the last few days leading up to kickoff, we have seen an award-winning Somali referee barred from the opportunity to officiate, Senegalese and Uzbekistani players harassed and searched by state forces, the Haitian team forced to change their jersey and denied the ability to wear a celebration of their national independence, an Ecuadorian fan brutalized by police, dozens of members of the Moroccan and Iranian delegations denied entry. Meanwhile, Iranian players are treated not as competitors but as enemies to be monitored, disciplined, and made examples of in the service of imperialist war, and incarcerated freedom fighters hunger strike for justice at Delaney Hall. The World Cup exposes the racial geography of imperialism: some bodies move freely, while others are subjected to suspicion, exclusion, humiliation, and violence. 

In its acceptance of and complicity in these acts, FIFA has reminded the world that it serves as just another colonial instrument of the global white supremacist, imperialist structure headed by the United States and the capitalist elite. The decision not to pull the games from the U.S. – while that country engages in a war of aggression against Iran, funds and aides genocides and domestic repression against non-European peoples, supports the terror unleashed in the West Bank and Gaza, and tightens its inhumane collective punishment and strangulation of Cuba – shows FIFA’s true nature, and that despite its sordid past, it has found new depths to sink to in its abdication of morality and humanity. The bloody stain upon these 2026 World Cup Games will never be clean.

We condemn FIFA as the racist colonial entity that it is. In response, we continue to call for the international community, the peoples and nations of the world, to Boycott the World Cup and Boycott the U.S. 

Boycott is the weapon of the colonized, the sanctioned, the dispossessed, and we refuse to be spectators to our own subjugation.

No Compromise No Retreat!

BAP National Co-Coordinators

Austin, Erica, Tunde

FIFA
Colonialism
World Cup
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