For weeks, a certain stench had been hanging over this past Saturday night’s highly anticipated soccer match between the U.S. and Mexican national teams. It was impossible to ignore, even if most public commentators, including the athletes themselves, as if out good taste or denial or respect for the sport itself, tried not to mention it. That stench, of course, originated with the comments of Donald Trump, who has notoriously denigrated Mexican immigrants in the United States as criminals and rapists. It was the stench of overt racism, and of the demagogic politics of stigmatization and fear embodied by Trump’s threats of mass deportations and walls on the border that Mexico should be...
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