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Last month, Giannis Antetokounmpo was named the NBA’s most valuable player. Considering the NBA’s status as the world’s premier professional basketball league, this distinction effectively marks him out as the best player worldwide. This is just one of the many awards the twenty-four-year-old Milwaukee Bucks forward has achieved in his short professional career. However, Giannis’s life has not always been so glittering. His parents, Charles and Veronika, arrived in Greece in 1991, making their new home in Sepolia, a neighborhood in north-central Athens. Around the time of Giannis’s birth in 1994, immigrants in Greece faced many obstacles, and his family was no exception. Racist insults and attacks were an everyday experience, and while they had come to Greece in search of a better life, their financial situation was always precarious. From childhood, Giannis and his two brothers had to contribute to his family’s budget by hawking watches, bags, and sunglasses in the streets. Other problems stemmed from Giannis’s nationality. Despite being born in Athens, as a child he had no citizenship — he was considered neither Greek nor Nigerian. When he turned twelve, he started playing basketball. Only then did he gain a purpose in life and a reason to dream of a better one, even as he battled the anxieties and daily struggles of a stateless immigrant. Today, Giannis is being held up as a reason for Greeks to be proud, with even forces on the center right of the political spectrum praising him as an example of a young man who fought for his dream. Yet to promote Giannis as one of the few sons of migrants who “deserves” to be Greek is a willful distortion of his life story. If the deportation threat that loomed over Giannis’s family during his childhood risked stopping him from fulfilling his potential, no one else should have to face it either.

Embracing an Icon Giannis’s recent achievement in becoming the NBA’s MVP brought him to the center of Greek public debate, as dozens of articles by journalists and pundits praised his feats. TV stations extensively discussed his story, and politicians sought to jump on the bandwagon of adulation. Newly elected prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis — leader of the conservative New Democracy party — posted a tweet emphasizing the Greek nation’s pride at Giannis’s achievements, noting that he had not forgotten his roots. His aide Konstantinos Kyranakis said that Greece owed a big “thank you” to the Milwaukee Bucks player. Even the vice president of New Democracy, Adonis Georgiadis — a politician with a clearly far-right background — tweeted to praise Giannis’s accomplishments. Given the nature of these reactions, anyone not familiar with the Greek context might reach the conclusion that New Democracy defends a pro-refugee and pro-immigration policy. This could hardly be further from the truth. In fact, in 2015, Mitsotakis and his party colleagues voted against a law that aimed to grant Greek nationality to children just like Giannis who were born in Greece to migrant parents without Greek nationality. Invoking a common far-right conspiracy, MPs opposed to the reform argued that this was a manipulative bill designed by Syriza in order to benefit electorally from the “pro-immigrant” vote. If the law had not passed, this would have left major barriers to citizenship for children born in similar circumstances to Giannis. Indeed, he himself remained stateless until he reached adulthood, and only thanks to his potential success as an outstanding basketball player was eventually “rewarded” with citizenship. In the run-up to the July 7 general election, Kyranakis and other leading figures in New Democracy rammed home this same message. Kyranakis tweeted a statement insisting that the new government would pay benefits only to the children of Greek parents. This rhetoric is not very different from the narrative (and, indeed, practical measures) promoted by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which has repeatedly advocated for a policy to distribute food parcels to “Greeks only.” Even the adulation for this migrant success story is of rather recent vintage. Last year, Georgiadis appeared on a local TV station and deliberately mispronounced Giannis Antetokoumpo’s name, claiming that he was born in Nigeria. The Greek Basketball Players’ Union issued a press statement defending Giannis, heralding him as an “icon for millions of kids and an advertisement for our country abroad,” indeed one “born and raised in Greece,” declaring the union “proud of Giannis and every Greek basketball player and athlete in general.” The statement ended on a biting note: “Sports are making Greece proud. What about its politics?”

Demonizing Minorities Of course, this demonization of minorities is not just a Greek phenomenon. Around the world, the neoliberal offensive against social spending has built its hegemony by mobilizing a racist discourse against the real or supposed recipients of tax dollars. In his attacks against the social-security policies established in the postwar United States, Ronald Reagan coined the term “welfare queens” to denote African American women, who — he claimed — overdrew on benefits because of their supposed laziness and unwillingness to work. The same discourse was used by the mainstream media in Germany to blame Greeks’ behavior for the economic disaster that hit the country in the post-2008 period. Such narratives were used by political and financial elites to justify the attacks on social spending made at the expense of African Americans and Greeks, respectively. The next step in this reasoning is the supposed need to limit welfare and public services only to those deemed deserving — those who are poor but visibly embody the Protestant ethic of hard work. Marrying this logic with a more explicit racism, Kyranakis proposed “welfare nativism” — discrimination in the allocation of benefits to families — as a solution to Greece’s low birth rates. If the New Democracy government implemented such a policy, this would deny the children of non-Greek parents — that is, young people just like Giannis — access to the benefits Greeks enjoy, pushing them into the category of the undeserving and stigmatized poor. In moments of crisis, the neoliberal right uses racist arguments to reshuffle parts of society and form a new, “included” social bloc on a discriminatory basis. This discourse emphasizes the supposed cultural factors behind the aberrant/deviating behavior of the groups that are not, or cannot, be part of the national whole. Following the Puerto Rican sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, this constitutes “a racism without race,” as a heavily racialized discussion is instead displaced onto the cultural level. We see this in the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has built up during the refugee crisis and been systematically propagated by New Democracy. Historically, neoliberal parties have used this narrative as a glue to bind different social groups in a cohesive narrative about the country’s past and present condition. This helps it map out a vision of the future empty of all the certainties of postwar Keynesian regulation and the rights it entailed. This discourse, today weaponized by New Democracy, also defines who deserves to be included or else excluded from the nation-state.