Is it time to talk about race in college athletics? No, not really. What purpose would it serve? What territory are we supposed to be driving towards by noticing that there’s only one white guy playing meaningful minutes in this Final Four game between Michigan State and UConn, and he’s not even from America? That’s a fact. So what?
(Destroying racial strawmen. Or strawpeople. Oh Jesus now we’re sexist.)
The simple truth is that discussing race makes people sufficiently uncomfortable that unless you’ve got something truly ground-breaking and worth saying, just leave it alone. It’s not going to change anything, it’s not going to be explored fully by the sensationalist media, and it’s just going to spark some truly stupid commentary from peanut galleries who have their own stupid pre-existing racial agendas. So let’s just keep our mouths shut until–oh damn it, for some reason, Geno Auriemma has something to say (via THE QUAD):
“White kids are always looked upon as being soft. So Stanford’s got a tremendous amount of really good players who for whatever reason, because they don’t look like Tina Charles or Maya Moore, the perception out there is going to be, well, they must be soft.”
“Well, I think that’s a bunch of bull.”
Take that, hypothetical racism! Now we can get back to… right where we started. Seriously, what good does it do to bring up white racism out of nowhere, then refute it? Sure, it’s way better than if Auriemma had gone Imus and made fun of black girls for no reason, but in this case it’s not better than not mentioning race in the first place.
Race is a hornet’s nest. Everyone knows this. Even Geno knows this; he opened his statement with “I know this is going to get played out the wrong way,” which for some reason wasn’t reason enough for him not to go there in the first place. But if he does that, his name’s not in the news, and we’re back to nobody talking about women’s basketball.
Oh, and last, this quote, Geno?
Nobody goes harder to the boards. Nobody takes more charges. Nobody runs the floor as hard. Those kids are as tough as any of the kids in the country.
Um, that sounds more like Tyler Hansbrough. Just sayin’.
11:59 am on April 6th, 2009
"The simple truth is that discussing race makes people sufficiently uncomfortable"
Clarification: Discussing race only generally makes white people uncomfortable. Non-white people discuss it all the time because the reality of the public's perception (majority white) and the media (majority white) affects day-to-day lives of those who are not white.
The consequences of NOT discussing race — even when that discussion is imperfect — is far far worse than the mild uncomfortability that it provides to some.
We should discuss race and perception every single day – not only after the police response to Ryan Moats and Robbie Tolan, the government response to Barry Bonds, or the initial media response to Sean Taylor.
These symbolic incidents continue from denying the conversation on race and perception in the first place.