It’s often said that black people do so well in sport in countries where they are in a minority because it offers the only opportunity they have to compete on a genuinely level playing field. That’s a simplification, of course: the playing field is not completely level there, either; the ongoing and countless stories of overt racism, from football to athletics and tennis, are testament to that. And if there’s one thing recent events have revealed, it’s that while sport may be more meritocratic than other workplaces, for people of colour the rewards are still conditional.

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The footballer Mesut Özil feels he is being penalised for his pride in Turkey, the nation of his heritage, by Germany, the nation of his citizenship. This episode has opened an emotive window into just how precarious national status can be. “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose,” Özil said, announcing his retirement from the national team after criticism of his recent performances.

Özil, a key member of the German team that won the World Cup in 2014, had faced a backlash before this year’s tournament after posing for a photo with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – a hardliner widely condemned for human rights abuses. But the problem Germans have with Özil seems to be more about his statement of cultural allegiance with the Turkish nation.

You don’t actually need to pose with a problematic president to experience this disowning. I will never forget the way in which Mo Farah – the British long-distance runner who was propelled to national treasure status after his two 2012 Olympic gold medals – immediately became “Somali-born Farah” when the integrity of his coach’s techniques came into question.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Johnson races to the 100m gold medal in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. ‘He was Canadian until he was banned for doping, at which point he became widely referred to as Jamaican-born.’ Photograph: Joe Patronite/Allsport

There are many other examples. Ben Johnson, the 100m world record holder, was Canadian – until he was banned for doping, at which point he became widely referred to as “Jamaican-born”. Yannick Noah, the French Open tennis champion who at one point seemed set for world domination, became camerounais when the dream expired.

The French experience is rather specific, as the row over the South African comedian Trevor Noah’s description of France’s World Cup triumph as a victory for the African continent – since that’s where so many players are descended from - reminds us. France has mastered the art of hypocrisy with its official “we don’t see race” stance. Instead, people of minority heritage are stigmatised as les issus de l’immigration – simply another way of othering them.

This prejudice is hard-baked into terminology across Europe. Visible minorities in Britain are labelled “immigrants” or, if they’re born here, “second generation immigrants”. Yet “indigenous” is a nonsensical term for a nation formed by millennia of immigration. Meanwhile, Brits abroad are seen as “expatriates”.

In the Netherlands, visible minority Dutch people were, until recently, allochtoon, a word many of them hate because – while it may initially have been well intentioned – it was always perceived as a way of distinguishing between white “indigenous” Dutch and non-white descendants of immigrants.

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In Germany there were Gastarbeiter – who were invited from Turkey to compensate for German labour shortages, but whose long-term presence in the country was not fully accepted. Not surprisingly, some of their children feel an emotional attachment to Turkey (“I have two hearts”, Özil has said), yet Germany has decided that dual allegiances are no longer convenient.

Germany doesn’t get to decide what the children of those it has treated as second-class citizens for so long get to do with the rights they have now acquired. Nor do France and Britain. Nor do the leaders of European countries that invented racial categories – necessary for the purposes of their own plans for enslavement and colonisation – get to unilaterally decide that these are no longer relevant, now that it’s become inconvenient for them to face up to the legacy of their own creation.

We get to define our identities, our allegiances and our relationship to our heritage. Özil’s identity as both Turkish and German – quite apart from being perfectly logical – is his by right to express. French people of African heritage have earned the right to their unconditional Frenchness, whether or not they play football, and no French person can stop them celebrating being part of the African diaspora.

This matters. In Britain, for example, many black people benefit from the struggle our parents and grandparents faced to secure citizenship and economic security – although the recent Windrush scandal reminds us that battle is still not over – and now have the luxury of choosing how we want to self-identify. And many of us are actually growing closer to our countries of heritage, despite having never lived there.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Similar connections can be found in the Irish and Italian diasporas in America, and in Jewish people everywhere. But for some reason it’s deemed more problematic when people of colour wish to organise around shared cultural or national heritage. It’s part of a belief that somehow Britain did us a favour by letting us come to this country, with our brown faces and strange faiths and all, for which we should be uniquely grateful.

The problem is, European countries didn’t “let” their migrants in; they needed people to rebuild their countries, offering in return low wages and poor living conditions. The descendants of those workers are still processing the racism, prejudice and disadvantage that resulted. But the one thing no one can take away is what we decide about who we are.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist