CRICKET LESSONS

That this is a very real concern is demonstrated by a clever recent study.⁸⁵ In the state of Uttar Pradeshin in India, a researcher ran an eight-month-long cricket league involving 800 players, all young men, chosen randomly out of 1,261.

But who they played against mattered. Those in teams randomly assigned to play against other-caste teams were less likely to make friends with people from other castes than those who played only against their own caste, or even those who never got to play anyone. Competition undermined contact.

These somewhat less optimistic results make the important point that contact may not be enough to produce tolerance; it may be necessary to have shared goals. Both in 1998 and in 2018, the victory of France’s team at the soccer World Cup had exactly this effect on the nation as a whole. In particular, the fact that some of the team’s champions grew up and learned their skills in the suburbs of Paris notorious for their dilapidated housing projects and their car-burning riots did create a sense of goodwill and shared purpose. In that moment, everyone could see that the kids from the 93 (as one disadvantaged district in the north of Paris is known) were not all lazy bums who skipped school and committed petty crimes. Behind France’s winning black-blanc-beur (“black-white-Arab”) team was the effort and the discipline of tens of thousands of young kids working hard to make it.