Monday, April 10, 2017

Why I learned more in the athletic department than the classroom

‘White girl.’ It’s a term - an expression, if you will - that’s existed in pop culture over the last several decades. Today, the term evokes skinny vanilla lattes and athleisure attire, Instagram filters and hair straighteners. But one expression it’s never associated with, and could be arguably presented as a foil to, is ‘black guy.’ This premise is in part what’s made Jordan Peele’s recent release “Get Out” such a hit in theaters.
Yet over the last two years, this white girl has been constantly associating herself with black guys as an employee in the athletic department for one of the most storied programs in college sports. And nothing - not the years of grade school education on the civil rights movement, or the hours of media coverage of the deaths of black men at the hands of the police - has been a more practical, powerful lesson in race relations.
There is so much that I simply do not believe I would ever know if not for my job in athletics.
A month ago, I wrote about empathy’s existence and application as a means to solve issues on a macro scale. Science and psychology aside, I think we can all agree that getting to know someone else is an easy way to encourage empathy.
It’s the same reason many Trump critics are having so much trouble hearing out Trump supporters. We don’t know these people. We aren’t hearing their stories. We don’t know their struggles. While we still might disagree with their solution to the problem (electing Trump), if we got to know them we might find that we have more in common with them than we think.
If not for my job in the athletic department, I don’t trust that I would have ever been brought into contact and given the opportunity to forge meaningful relationships with black people.
I look back on the last 22 years of my life, trying to distinguish where else those connections might have formed. While my black classmates and I may have shared a schoolyard, we rarely shared a classroom. I had a couple of black teachers. I had a couple of black teammates and black coaches across my 17-year soccer career. I can’t think of a single black family living in my neighborhood. And while they attend my university, black and African-American students make up just 5.6% of the student body.
If not for my job in the athletic department, I don’t know if or when I would’ve realized why it’s a problem that me and all the other upper middle class white and Hispanic classmates with whom I shared a social circle frequently referred to each other by the n-word without any hesitation just because we heard it in all our favorite songs; why it’s problematic that we actively avoided going to the cafeteria during lunchtime because that’s where all the (predominately black) kids who were bussed in ate lunch; or why it’s wrong that we called any black person who shared many of our interests or occupied our same spaces an Oreo.
This retrospective is why “Get Out” resonated so deeply with me, because I know that my friends and I were exactly the audience he was targeting. As screenrant.com’s Bob Chipman explains,

Peele’s film is using a well-worn horror-movie narrative (specifically, the narrative of The Stepford Wives – a paranoid 1970s chiller in which a women discovers that the men of her suspiciously-perfect small town are replacing their “difficult” feminist wives with obedient, submissive 1950s-style robot duplicates) in order to needle a very specific subset of White racism: “Nice” Liberals who are insistent of their non-racism because they admire an abstract ideal of Blackness while not actually engaging or regularly encountering any actual Black people.
           
In a little over a month, I’ll graduate from college and leave behind this job. I'm not sure whether I'm quite ready to leave behind sunny walks across campus, football game days, and weekends that start on Thursday night. There is one thing I'm sure of, though: if graduation means joining a whitewashed workplace, I'm definitely in no rush to Get Out.

5 comments:

  1. This is a great read. As someone who also works in the athletic department, I know how you feel about everything. You say “If not for my job in the athletic department, I don’t trust that I would have ever been brought into contact and given the opportunity to forge meaningful relationships with black people.” While I’m so happy you had an experience with another culture, I think it is sad that the only way you got this experience was through athletics. Not saying it is your fault at all, it’s all of ours. We have such a diverse campus and such a diverse/ international student body, but somehow everyone seems to stick to their own “kind”.

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  2. This is a very well written and eye opening piece. I think that we are at a University that can be so sheltered yet we have so many opportunities to connect to the rest of the student body. It sounds like you have had a truly enriching experience through working with the athletics department but I agree with Hamdah that it is sad that this is the only way you got this experience. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very diverse community and being involved in sports exposed me to people of all races which is something I will never take for granted. How do you think or how do you wish things had been different when you were growing up? How do you think that you could have been given the opportunity to be "brought into contact and given the opportunity to forge meaningful relationships with black people"? I wish you all the best when graduation comes around!

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  3. This is a piece that was screaming to be written. With the election of Trump, there’s been a ton of focus on a mid-20th century brand of racism, rather than the subtle ignorance that prevails today. It’s incredibly easy to say you care about a cause or population, then to turn around and appropriate their culture. It’s incredibly easy to frown at the violence black American communities face at the hands of police, then shrug and continue what you’re doing because you are not personally affected.



    One big way to push past this is to do exactly what you have been doing: make relationships. Develop meaningful connections with people who you do not understand, and take time to listen. It’s one of the only ways to eradicate this pervasive, uniquely liberal problem.

    -Maika Koehl

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  4. I think it is great that you had the opportunity to work in athletics and be able to learn first hand the intricacies of another culture. I think people should take more initiative as you did in trying to understand people from a different culture than you have been exposed to. I feel as though this helps people get a more accurate perspective of the culture as a whole before any false judgements are made. Furthermore, I agree with you in saying that Trump critics might be having trouble understanding Trump supporters because they do not know their lives more intimately. However, I feel that the opposition Trump critics have is more rooted in the hurtful, degrading rhetoric that called for division in America, by Trump. Therefore, it would be hard to have these parties unify when a good majority of them truly believe that American division is the key to "Make America Great!" Lastly, I think your comments about the minimal 5.6% of African Americans who attend USC really speaks volume. I wonder how much of that percentage are in athletics? The sad reality is that a significant portion of African Americans who might have been recruited by USC might not have had a chance to receive an "elite" education if it were not for their athletic abilities (Or at least it feels this way). I think that in order to have a more inclusive and integrative student body, we together must encourage our University as a whole to be even more open minded to one another’s background.

    -Eddie Licon

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  5. Unfortunate as it is, this is a sad reality for one of the few ways white students can build meaningful relationships and arrive at a deeper understanding of the struggles for black students enrolled in universities across the country. Finding the majority of black students inside an athletic department is no coincidence, either. The NCAA has provided a ‘promise’ for many (W)NBA, NFL,etc. aspiring athletes although it comes at a very high price- complete control of their lives (both athletically, academically, and personally) for their undergraduate career. Although I am happy that you were able to build relationships in the athletic department, I hope you continue to stay in touch with them after they graduate and finish their athletic careers. As a former NCAA athlete, the journey really begins after you tie up your athletic shoes and walk away from the sport you have played your entire life. University athletes are still living in the ‘bubble’ when they are playing because they are so focused on their team, their sport, and their athletic career. I think the more meaningful conversations you will have to better understand the complexities of their struggles are after they, too, tie up their shoes and graduate. I think if there were more people of color in our classroom this semester, we would be having different conversations or hearing concerns from a viewpoint that we may never have thought about. I think that is both the beauty and necessity of why we need diversity in our classrooms. Unfortunately, 5.6% of the student body at USC does not meet that standard, especially when the majority of those students are athletes and, not to their fault, are not able to be invested in classroom discussions like other students whether its due to travel, practices, injuries, or being overwhelmed with the responsibilities that athletics is demanding from them.

    -Haley Videckis

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