This has been going on for not days, not months, not years — but decades upon centuries.
We’re not really that small-minded to believe some jughead university president is the epicenter of it all, are we? Because if we are, then we’re just as easily swayed to believe a football team cures all.
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“We stopped listening to each other,” Missouri president Tim Wolfe said in describing the latest hotspot in race relations in this country.
The problem is, we’ve never listened to each other.
There’s a lesson to be learned here, a distinct and definitive ideal that too long has been ignored and too often has been overlooked. The sin of mankind isn’t racism, it's refusing to address it.
The greater evil is avoiding the hard, soul-exposing work to find an answer to the very thing that is, more than anything, tearing us apart.
Instead of digging deep and finding common ground on the realities of racism and race relations, it all devolves into surface hysteria. So what do we do this time around? We sprinkle the magical fairy dust of football over the University of Missouri and hope it will go away.
Just like Ferguson has gone away. Just like Watts, just like Liberty City.
Just like the most disturbing and destructive moment in the history of our great Republic: the Civil War.
“This is not the way change should come about,” Wolfe said in announcing his resignation.
Then maybe sports is.
As absolutely ridiculous and small as it sounds, maybe we actually can begin to find common ground in the one thing that brings us all together. If we didn’t think sport mirrors society before, we can ignore it no longer.
Two years ago the Grambling football players used the threat of walking out over poor playing conditions, and actually skipped a game before the university agreed to change. In the early 1970s, Washington refused to come back on the field after halftime unless a statement was read over the loudspeaker about the players’ opposition to the war in Vietnam.
In 1969, Stanford declared it would honor an “athlete’s right of conscience” — which would allow an athlete to boycott a school or event that he or she deemed “personally repugnant.”
None of those events, though, carried the weight of the statement from the Missouri football team, which declared it would suspend all activity until Wolfe resigned. Think about that: a major college football team; a member of the big, bad SEC, and a program that two years ago was one win away from playing in the BCS National Championship Game, threatening to walk out.
Then, almost on cue, the man who had ignored a year of complaints from black students at Missouri suddenly decided to step aside after the story grew outside the bucolic campus in Columbia. The Power of the People.
Or in this case, the pigskin.
Of course this was a bottom-line, money-driven decision based squarely on the strong shoulders of football. The last thing Missouri needs is loss of revenue from a football game and the unintended consequences that come with it, most notably, the wrath of our instant-on, instant-gratification society.
Yet here’s the problem: in our zero attention span society, too many will see this potential of sports wedging its way into society’s ills as a two-minute television clip. The bobblehead flunky steps in front of a camera and decries all things racism and throws it back to the anchor desk, where we move to the next story about the flying squirrel.
“Would you look at him go!”
This is hard work, people. It’s not driving by and staring at the fire and smoke billowing from the epicenter, then hitting the pedal to swing by Starbucks for a latte.
It’s not standing on top of a car and screaming, “Burn this #@&* down!” and destroying the lives of hard-working neighbors in the collateral damage.
It’s finding out who we really are, and understanding the value of the other opinion.
I sat in Texas coach Charlie Strong’s office last April, and listened to a man who dealt with systemic racism throughout his coaching career. If anyone in the coaching fraternity had the right to be bitter, to stand his ground, it’s Strong.
“When you get bitter, it stops you from moving forward,” Strong said. “We all have to step back and look at things from the other person’s perspective, and realize what their battles are. We don’t want to hear the other person’s side because we feel like we’re always right, so we don’t listen.”
If we take anything from this, it’s the value of listening — with our ears and our minds. Digest it, process it, embrace it.
It’s impossible to see the seminal moment of the Missouri football players deciding they’d seen enough, and not realize the power of football at a university.
Who cares if the team probably wouldn’t have done the same thing if they were 9-0 and in the middle of a championship season? Who cares if coach Gary Pinkel had to take the side of players now or lose the team forever?
Again, that’s all surface noise in the grand scheme. Dig deeper, everyone.
The move by the football team worked, forcing a president who clearly wasn’t interested in addressing problems to stand aside for change.
Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, we’ve stared at the opportunity for change and blinked. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to give the one thing that brings us all together a chance to fix the one thing that drives us apart.
Who would ever imagine it could be found in an oblong ball?