The University of Mizzery: Thoughts on the Football Protest Movement

Nov 20, 2015

10 min read

What do you call 11 black men running unto a football field? Typical. What do you call a black college student wearing a Malcolm X t-shirt shopping in Georgetown? Typical. What do you call a black community with no residents serving as an elected official or owning a local business? Get the point. America always celebrates or rewards blacks when we do the typical thing. Continue playing football on our plantation masquerading as a state university like in Columbia and we will fire administrators who condone the status quo. Pray while our police bust your heads open like in Birmingham and we will build you a museum. As typical as those maneuvers are, they do create powerful opportunities for black Americans. But like Nick Anderson in the NBA Finals, we miss every chance to secure a victory from our ample opportunities. There are two lessons to learn here from the typical black response to America being America and I will deal with each individually (although there is significant overlap). As you read, I ask you to recall what my preacher used to say—If you can’t say Amen, say OUCH!

#1. Black people still feel the need to please white people.

Black people please white people the most by expertly performing in the roles that make the majority of white people happy and comfortable. I mean, we got these roles DOWN! I remember one day, while in graduate school in Washington, D.C., attending the real HU, I was carrying in some things into my basement apartment with my girlfriend at the time. Five white girls rented the rooms in the house above me. One of them happened to be carrying some things in or out of the house at the time we were coming in. I can’t remember what she was carrying, all I remember is my reaction. She took one misstep and almost, almost mind you, dropped her items and I SPRANG into action. Practically shoving my girlfriend aside, I dropped my belongings and balanced this woman whose name I never even knew. Now at this time in my life, I was a ‘conscious’ black man, ready to stomp on The Man wherever he reared his ugly head! In college, I led my fraternity boycott against racist white fraternity parties, observed Dr. King’s birthday in a way that befitted black people, I even wrote 12 biographies of lesser known blacks and emailed to them every student on my 95% white campus during Black History Month. You couldn’t tell me I wasn’t liberated. But when we got inside my apartment, all I could see was the hurt and disappointment in my girlfriend’s face. Typically, when I was in the wrong, a boisterous critique of my alleged misdeed would produce an argument. But this wrong cut deep. No volume was needed. She proceeded to say she’s never seen that sort of reaction out of me towards her or anyone else. She didn’t need to say that I performed for a white woman because I already knew. That implicit desire to save and serve any random white person, particularly a white woman overrode every notion inside me. I can admit this about myself because I see it in black people everywhere.

That’s why when revolutionary leaders like Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton and the like come along, neither blacks nor whites know what to do with them. That’s why our President, Barack Obama, had to disavow his own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright to secure the Presidency. I played the role that day, and probably many other days since although I hate to admit it. Black people will play the role everyday of our lives until we sincerely fight for complete independence from Western hegemony. There is only one logical conclusion to justify why we let obscene numbers of our black youth underachieve academically and display destructive mores socially nationwide. It makes mainsteam white people safe and happy to know the organization and solidarity of the black community remains generations off. There is no other logical explanation why integration eroded nearly every small business in black America. When we “got us us free”, we ran to the very stores that made us wait at the back. We ate at every restaurant that made us pick up from the window. But we never stopped and thought that if we were all at white stores, who was patronizing ours? That’s right, no one. And there is no other logical narrative to explain why black America impotently watched Michael Jackson be born a black man and die a white something. This man was born a genius but could not overthrow one of the most diabolical elements or racialized dehumanization—Blacks were taught to hate ourselves. Blacks hate it when our dirty little secret is exposed. Particularly middle class blacks, who want to believe that money is the cleansing solvent to purify the marginalization applied to each of us. Blacks in general really want to believe the servile part of us is dead and gone. Black people refute our need to heal, our need to reclaim our image, history and culture to simply save face in front of our white supervisors, colleagues, racquetball partners and spouses. It is difficult for blacks to shake this role of keeping white folks smiling because we ignore our own fortitude to advance in a system that we do not control.

For one, nearly every black American can trace back two generations and discover multiple forbears employed in servile positions, living in American apartheid townships and constantly groveling to white authority for our earned wages, honors and promotions that were rightfully ours. Remaining subservient was in embedded in our culture! I grew up in the South and servility to white America was still ingrained in upbringing. The ‘shhhhhhhhh’ technique told to young blacks when white folks were around survived all ten years of the 1980’s. My senior year in high school in 1999, the beginning of the white-liberal post-racial era, still required for me and a white friend to organize race relations panel discussions at the supposed forward thinking Grady High School in Midtown Atlanta. In 2003, my senior year in college, jokes celebrating ‘good white folks’ (opposed to the other sort) still killed in black audiences. I laughed my ass off! People cry out in a loud voice that racism is dead. If so, please tell me the exact year that it died?

For the last 10 years, I taught predominantly working class black and Hispanic students in community based organizations better known as non-profits. My first two years, I worked with teens, aged 14-19. Many of these students experienced consistent behavioral shortfalls. To use 1980’s terminology and to slightly offend my own sensibilities, these kids were bad as hell! Opinionated and out-going to a fault, they would speak out of turn, saying at times some of the most garish statements I’ve heard anywhere other than a politician’s journal. One day we took a field trip to city hall and as a mini-sociological experiment, I challenged them to speak up while at City Hall. Granted, it was a new environment with new faces, but nevertheless, I reminded them of that when I issued the challenge. Ask a question, ask if they could show you to the restroom- anything! But I could predict the result before we left. Not a peep, a question or a whisper. When we returned, I told them, it is easy to stand up and speak out to our staff. You challenge us daily. But to not say a word, not even an answer to a question in the face of bureaucratic whites in suits and flag pins proved just how conditioned we were. Black speakers came to our program and we traveled to black museums only to get the same unruly results. Apprehension and insecurity presented themselves among proper whites only.

The servile psychology of blacks made its greatest impact in black protest. The Revolutionary War, the Massachusetts Minutemen, the Civil War, Bacon’s Rebellion plus the infamous Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens’ Councils are widespread and celebrated examples of whites expressing grievance to authority through violence and direct action militancy. It was typical of Black protest not to dare to militantly upset the racial norms. Conventional and black Christian protest leaders were directed not to be violent by white authoritarians or terrorists and black leaders listened. Mainstream civil rights protesters were non-violent, advocated forgiveness as our weapon, insisted not to harm any whites in dissension to the most repressive, restrictive and racialized capitalism the world has ever seen. Despite freedom riders being met with tire irons to the head in Anniston, AL, black protest did what it was told.

How does this relate to The Missouri Football team? Black grievances were at a boiling point in Columbia several months ago from instances of racism last fall. Public and private dissatisfaction by black students reached campus administration who were either unwilling or unable to satisfy the requests by black students. Typical. And why should they have listened? Has any authority figure in history changed the entire culture of an institution to satisfy the needs of 3 or 4% of the population? It is important to illustrate the propensity for black Americans to engage in struggles with very long odds for success in the name of integration, human rights or abject stupidity. The state university of Missouri, whose history of racism is surpassed only by Mississippi and South Africa, has a student population of 35, 000 students of which 4-6% are black. Hell, of America’s 340 million citizens, only 12% of the national population is black, with overwhelming black concentrations in metropolitan communities and the Southeastern United States. The greatest consequence of scant representation nationwide is that blacks cannot dominate or control the spaces in which there is a meager base for support. But that doesn’t stop black folk from always chasing hope into the wilderness to find the trees. Somewhat admirable in retrospect, but in evaluating the sheer waste of our attempts to convince power-hungry Westerners to love and share at the expense of our solidarity and community building, I shudder to imagine the pristine institutions of family, education, finance and culture we should have produced for ourselves first, then to all. Typical.

Very typical of black protest, a black graduate student posited that a nonviolent hunger strike would display the resolve of black students on campus to change things. Now in evaluating America’s response to a black man being drug around Texas tied to the back of a truck, another black man voluntarily going hungry gained the attention of only the four geese and six ducks that fed on this man’s lunch the day he decided not to eat. What became atypical were black men refusing to play their typical sport, football. Now black people can do a lot of things to gain attention. But what gains determined attention of the white power structure is the refusal of blacks to do our same old, same old and stay in our 'place'. Imagine if blacks stop singing, dancing, running, laughing and shining our “pearly whites” til real justice flowed like rivers. Imagine if the Auburn University football team, only a few years removed from racist caricatures by fraternities on their campus, joined Mizzou in solidairty. What if every SEC black football player joined together to say that if one black student is oppressed, we all are oppressed. A bale of cotton wouldn’t get picked in the South until the white power structure got them boys back on the field before Saturday. But blacks don't do that. Typical.

This crescendo (or decrescendo for some) of analysis leads to my second point and conclusion to this blog post. It is a fact that blacks have been beaten and hammered to be overrepresented in only a few stereotypical, but highly visible professions. Yet every post-Civil Rights protest window are absent of our strongest political weapons. Typical Michael Jordan can’t be involved because “Republicans buy shoes too.” Charles Barkley stated in his commercial that clearly he “is not a role model”. Tiger Woods? Let’s just say that all I can expect from that brother is to not bleach his skin as others have done. Even Oprah has her moments in the self-hating game. Although nearly worshipped throughout the black community, Oprah provided a devastating blow to the sorely needed coalitions between black Americans here and black communities throughout the diaspora. In building her school for girls in South Africa, when asked why no corresponding school was being built in America for black students here, she conveniently quipped that the youth of South Africa would actually appreciate the school. Even the most successful blacks play the very typical role of dividing black solidarity by class, as wealthy blacks maintain less and less direct contact with the masses of black poor and working classes or by nationality as Oprah callously did.

When Donald Sterling was removed from owning the Los Angeles Clippers, the biggest black stars on the planet, including LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Kevin Durant and Doc Rivers, the Clippers head coach applauded the move as if racism itself had been removed entirely from the NBA in one fell swoop. Typical. Despite the fact that the NBA has never had a black majority owner, in addition to every other American sports league that black Americans dominated for over 50 years, black athletes almost started speaking in tongues when Sterling was ousted. Very typical. Black players subscribe to the foolish idea that no one is racist until we catch them saying nigger on audio or video, until there is a video of them raping a black woman or getting caught turning over incubators full of black babies in hospital maternity wards. Typical. And as for assaulting or raping black women goes, I guess those black stars leave that to their colleagues. Allen Iverson, Ray Rice, Floyd Mayweather, Mike Tyson, Greg Hardy, Rae Carruth and Wilt Chamberlain are the highlight names of A-list black athletes, past and present, who have shown contempt and violence towards precious black women. Musicians have no better a resume as the queens of R & B and soul, Mary J. Blige and Aretha Franklin respectively, are survivors of domestic abuse at the hands of black men. Rap and R & B lyrics continue to divide our communities through adulation of lifestyles that wantonly consume black women as just another product to be purchased by the wads of cash with just a” flick of the wrist”.

The white power structure is made happy by our shucking and jiving and we seem content with having our greatest income earners just be high-priced laborers for billion dollar white organizations. Since 1980, black athletes have garnered well over $75 billion to the delight of white bankers, agents, hanger-ons and escort girls. It is amazing that generation after generation of young black boys, when asked who or what they want to be when they grow up, answer that they desire to emulate some ball player or some rapper. Those are literally the only examples they see on television other than the litany of black Hollywood stars guilty of the same vices. The worst is that along with the greed, decadence, hypocrisy and herpes young black men stand to gain from their fame, political apathy and ignorance will top the list. Typical.