ABSTRACT

The responses to the beginning of the exciting month-long World Cup 2010 soccer tournament in South Africa have so far been as expected. When South Africa’s national rugby team played fifteen years ago in a prelude to this month, the team had only one black player; today’s South African soccer team has one white player! Don Beck made sixty-three trips to South Africa beginning in 1981 with the idea that apartheid was not a permanent condition and that there was a way to break the historic division of the races and get to the core of racial stereotyping. He had a kind of “code of cultural differences,” as some have put it, of judging and inspiring people according to value systems instead of skin-color, gender or ethnic stereotypes. In fact, in the modern world, the tragedy is that so many heartfelt attempts to help peoples have failed because these initiatives were all tailor-made for one group or level of people.