Imagine playing football on a field where the home team has
the advantage of playing on a downhill slope, and with the wind and sun at
their backs, and where the visiting team’s side of the field is marked in
twenty yard increments rather than ten, so that they must move the ball twice
the distance of the home field to score a touchdown. Would you say this game is
being played on a level playing field with fair rules?
Obviously, players in such a game would not have equal
chances to succeed, but what if the home team was also unaware of their unfair
advantages? What if the game was being played on a foggy day and the home team
could not see the unequal slope of the field, or feel the surging winds blowing
in the face of their opponent? Would players on this team feel as proud of
their victory under such conditions?
Imagining a football game being played this way, under these
unfair conditions, is difficult for most of us because we expect fair play when
we compete, and we are surprised to learn that such unfair conditions could
even exist because we have not played such a game before. But some Americans
are quite familiar with these rules and, even though they play anyway, they
might harbor a certain resentment toward the rule makers, or even the opposing
team’s players who had no part in making those rules, especially when the home
team players claim that the game was fair all along.
Now imagine that the home team’s referee wants the home team
to win, so she calls more penalties on the visiting team to keep them from
scoring. Which team would be more upset about those bad calls on the field? If
you found yourself on the visiting team forced to play this unfair game, who
would you resent more, the referee for making bad calls on the field, the rule
makers for creating a game with such unequal advantage, or the home field
players for not acknowledging their advantage when they win a game that’s been fixed?
Or would you just be pissed at Colin Kaepernick and the
Millikin football team for the manner in which they brought the issue to your
attention?
We need to remember that the whole point of these demonstrations
is to raise awareness about all the unfair, discriminatory types of racism in
the criminal justice system toward African-Americans, including police brutality.
In a country that prides itself on freedom of expression, why are we obsessing
over the form of that expression rather than the issue at hand? We seem to have
forgotten the most basic civil right that formed the foundation of our national
heritage - the freedom to protest peacefully. Instead, we seem to have adopted
a form of Nazi patriotism, where flag
waving is mandatory, and where one person (or one team) is condemned for
exercising their American right to peacefully dissent in whatever way they
choose. Isn’t this ideal the very right our soldiers have fought and died for?
Isn’t this why this ideal was established in the FIRST amendment, and not the
second or twelfth? Sadly, some have succumbed to conservative political
correctness over America’s proud heritage of freedom of speech, in a country
that been a beacon of openness to ideas, including those ideas that sometime
offend us.
The “controversy” over Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during
the national anthem exposes our nation’s ignorance of the game itself, more
than it does his audacity to do so. The negative reaction to our own Big Blue
football team to remain in the locker room during the national anthem, showing
respect through individual silent reflection (or one player’s decision to
stand), likewise underscores our national deflection of the real issue of
racial inequality more than it does the Fox News narrative that Millikin must
hate America and its soldiers.
Like many of you, I found myself having to defend Millikin’s
decision to support the team, after the social media blitz that followed soon
after Fox News and other conservative media outlets sacked us for doing it. On
Facebook, for example, I was scolded for working at such an unpatriotic school,
and “one
of the most black and liberal colleges around”. I mean, just
read the comments underneath the original article
from Fox News and you’ll see the outrage of some voices in conservative,
white America over everything except
what the demonstrations of Kaepernick and our football team are all about. They
are way out of bounds in this regard. Across the country, and across most
sports, athletes are expressing their concern over racial injustice in the
criminal justice system. Even superstars like women’s soccer phenom (and former
sociology major of mine at the University of Portland :), Megan Rapinoe, who continues
her solo demonstration. Listen
to her defend her anthem-kneeling here.
So let’s get back in the game. Let’s talk about the central
issue - the unjust system of criminal justice in this country – the racially systemic
problems inherent in our system that the Black Lives Matter movement has been
so successful at elevating to a national conversation (and why police
departments across the country are currently reforming their police conduct practices
following federal investigations by the Department of Justice in both Ferguson
and Baltimore after the BLM outcry). And let’s talk about the reasons why Kaepernick’s
mere kneeling, or our school’s support of our team’s decision to offer our
players the freedom to express themselves how they wish, has agitated so many
people around the country. A sociological perspective can help us better
understand the game we are really playing here.
As white people we don’t readily see our advantages, and we
are often perplexed by the visiting team’s outrage over injustice on the field
of play because we do not suffer those injustices nearly as often. Have you
ever watched a tight game with a friend who roots for the other team, and
noticed how much more upset he gets when the referee fails to drop a flag for
defensive pass interference when your team just scored on that play? It’s kinda
like that.
Maybe it’s just easier to blame the game’s losers. As
Michelle Alexander points out in her recent book, The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, we throw far more penalty flags at
African-Americans than Whites for similar infractions, disproportionately
targeting one team over another, resulting in systemic disadvantages that keep
one team from winning, an intentional function of the modern criminal justice
system. If you happen to have been born on the winning team, and fail to see
the advantages your team has been given, you might take the time to read her
book, or consider the volumes of scholarship on the subject of racial injustice
in our criminal justice system, such as these
several hundred, peer-reviewed studies that say the same thing. Or you could listen to the voices of history
that remind us of the true nature and scope of persistent racism in America,
voices largely absent in traditional history classes, such as Frederick
Douglass who said in 1853:
“A heavy and cruel
hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only
deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our White countrymen do not know us.
They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our
history and progress, and are misinformed as to our principles and ideals that
guide us as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as a
characterless and purposeless people and, hence, we hold up our heads, if at
all, against the withering influence of a nations’ scorn and contempt.”
And finally, if you are a visual learner, I implore you to watch a new documentary on
Netflix entitled, “13th” for a powerful, eye-opening examination
of racism in the criminal justice system, where reputable experts in the field
examine this form of institutional racism with a historical lens.
Ironically, most of those who should probably educate
themselves on these facts won’t bother with it, exercising their privilege to
ignore the facts about that very privilege. They don’t need to bother with
trying to understand how American life is experienced differently by Black men
and women in America because they have never really felt this experience, and
because they feel they are not directly affected by it. This is one form of
white privilege: the privilege of not
having to educate yourself about the minority experience in America. It is the
privilege of ignorance.
Instead, as white Americans, we use our privilege to deflect
the national conversation from these uncomfortable facts toward a tangential conversation
about patriotism and how it ought to be publicly displayed, uniformly. Of
course, we should be proud to be Americans, but our national pride should not
discourage outrage over injustice no matter how we choose to voice it. So, for
example, instead of acknowledging the anger expressed by a student like LeRyan
Wolfe, who has written several heart-felt essays on the subject of white
privilege recently, we can avoid facing it by slamming him for the “offensive”
words he’s used to call out the uncomfortable subject of racism, or by
dismissing his opinion as just that of another “angry Black man”, which is
another form of privileged deflection. He’s just being a bad sport about it,
complaining about the rules of the game. That’s what “people like that” do.
But what LeRyan is really trying to do is to call a foul in
a game being played on an uneven playing field, with referees who are paid by
the home team. The referees in this
game are the police officers patrolling the streets of our community, and the uneven
field we are playing on is our criminal justice system. So even though the
referees are not to blame for the rules of the game, we can understand why the
visiting team might be angry with them for favoring their home team – as
misplaced as that anger may be - because they represent this historical
injustice. And as spectators we should at least be honest enough to recognize
our team’s unfair advantage when the referees make bad calls that cause the
other team to lose.
And we shouldn’t be so vexed when the other team takes a
knee.
Kenneth Laundra, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology & Organizational Leadership
10/20/16
