It never surprises me what people will do when they feel that they’re being shorted on playing time. I mean that literally. I’ve heard of things as nutty as parents trying to fight the coach - at the game! So when I see that a group of student-athletes in Colorado went racial in their attacks on the coach because they felt they were being shorted, I’m not really surprised. What does surprise me, still, is the level of ignorance that is being purported. In a NYT article about the case, the attorney for one of the boys had the following to say:
The intent of the Confederate flag shirts was misunderstood, Mr. Garcia said.“The boys were not looking at it as a racial symbol,” he said. “They were rebelling against what they perceived to be unfair coaching practices. They didn’t understand that it would be viewed as hurtful or mean-spirited.”
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One more time. It’s 2007. Blackface? Confederate battle flag? People can wear what they want, but I simply don’t believe that there is this whole clutch of people who don’t know that those expressions are offensive. I just don’t believe it.
Now. At the same time, I might argue that the wearing of the confederate flag t-shirt and the pictures with the Nazi salute, while definitely intended to be offensive, were not necessarily racist. In going back to my operating theory that when in an argument, people will generally do whatever they think is most hurtful to the other party, it’s conceivable to me that a teenager who is mad about his playing time might do some type of passive-aggressive nonsense like wearing a shirt he knows will get his coach pissed off without really considering the larger ramifications. In other words, i’m not swallowing the lawyers kool-aid that they didn’t know about the offensiveness of the expressions, but I’m not sure that the target of the offensive actions was chosen because of his race. If the coach had been white, I might argue that the misguided youths would have chosen something else personal to the coach to attack. Because race is easy, they chose that.
Which, of course, should not absolve them of the type of beat-down that Fudge ‘nem handed down in Higher Learning.
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No, these guys knew exactly what they were doing, and why they were doing it. To pawn the whole exercise off on some lame stand-in of an excuse like ignorance is insulting.
The area of the state in question is extremely rural. Racial tensions aren’t anything particularly new there. When I was in high school, we occasionally made the long trip down to that area to play against smaller high schools (Manzanola, Walsenburg, etc.). The tensions were always somewhat present between the white population, and the numerous hispanic families that lived there. To have such tensions simply expand to one of the only Black families in the area isn’t surprising - no matter how disappointing the phenomenon happens to be.
These kids (and, unfortunately, their parents, too, it would seem) are nothing more than punks, angry that their coach didn’t share their high opinions of their playing abilities, and eager to see race as the ultimate cause.