Facebook, twitter, blogs, and other media erupted in a rather ridiculous battle of words over the airing of a Coca-cola commercial during Super Bowl forty-eight. The offense was the fact Coca-Cola represented a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual America (with the song lyrics of America the Beautiful sung in various languages) to sell its product to us. I’m not a business professor, but it seems that a trans-national corporation like Coke would find it a wise strategy to sell its product to as many people around the globe and within the U.S. as possible. I actually thought the commercial was corny, but hey, I also thought the Doritos time-machine commercial was awesome. To my dumbfounded surprise, all of a sudden there was a spontaneous call from a select number of people to boycott Coca-Cola. An example below:

Like many Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners, a lot of our friends on social media are comprised of the network of BJJers in our county/state/academy. For one of my friends, the above poster was a former training buddy.

I myself have had the unlucky encounter with flat-out racist, English-only, kick-out-all-immigrants-who-don’t-seem-to-spontaneously-assimilate jiu-jitsukas both in my school and in my network of schools.

Without getting into the very internal dynamics of the politics itself, it seems to me that there’s quite a hypocritical contradiction (or delusion) to be practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu with a most-likely Brazilian immigrant, whose status history you do not know, nor would care to know, and to then be espousing xenophobic, deportation, “I want a pure America” politics.

The day after that November 1993 fight in the first UFC when Royce Gracie showed the U.S. the brutal effectiveness of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a demand for jiu-jitsu instructors blew up. Chad Edward, writing for the Cincinnati Enquirer, describes increase in demand in BJJ and MMA as follows: “modern MMA began the next day, when fighters from various styles enrolled at their local Brazilian jiu-jitsu schools.”[1]

To be more accurate, people flooded those very few places that offered Brazilian jiu-jitsu to decipher for them what they had witnessed: a diminutive fighter winning a no-holds-barred tournament mostly from his back.

The first Ultimate Fighting Championship was how the demand to teach jiu-jitsu was created in the U.S. Actually, there was a HUGE demand in the labor market. Those demanding this martial arts knowledge were both “pro” and “anti” immigrant martial art enthusiasts.

There’s a hocus-pocus mind magic trick that occurs when some people purchase something. It’s a strange logic in which some feel the right to own or procure whatever service they can pay for, and to have all politics bracketed off at the point of purchase. This is true whether someone is hiring a nanny in rich New Canaan, Connecticut; or the contractor who’s remodeling your Hollywood apartment just picked up day laborers from East L.A. It’s as if the goods-exchange is an immunity from the field of politics. Yet, ideologically, with the internet and too many Super Bowl beers in them, they find themselves in the most hypocritical act of denouncing a company for trying to sell its product to the very immigrant they probably hired to watch their kid or fix their bathroom, and whose money is probably the money that the day before was in their bank account.

In the jiu-jitsu community, the elephant in the room when a teammate here or there posts an anti-immigrant sentiment, is that they are doing so while being the pupil of an immigrant, of an immigrant’s product, and of an immigrant’s long path to get to remote places in the U.S. Not all schools are in Los Angeles or Miami. Some schools are in nice (but not Rio-nice) places like Little Rock or Pensacola or like mine in suburban Connecticut.

On the whole English-only and deportation and denial of basic human services thing, I am flabbergasted that one can be a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner and hold any of those views. On one level, I truly believe it is against the philosophy of jiu-jitsu to do so. (We can debate this, I understand.) On another undebatable level, the “anti-immigrant” jiu-jitsuka is either a full-in-awareness hypocrite or they don’t have the analytical capacities to feel the dissonance between their real-world on the mat practice and their ideological political rants.

That person must only be bowing to his instructor with his pockets and then holding picket signs out on the streets or cyberspace demanding the instructor’s very deportation.

[1] Edward, Chad, “Untangling a sport that transcends style,” AZCentral.com, October 30, 2007, http://www.azcentral.com/sports/azetc/articles/1030mma.html.