POLITICAL FOOTBALL

A PROTEST IN TRUMP COUNTRY BRINGS HOME THE RACIAL DIVIDE IN AMERICA

like her. Then her county, which voted twice for Barack Obama, joined with the nation to elect Donald Trump, whose comments about Muslims and minorities seemed to only further divide Americans between “us” and “them.”

Aajah saw her new president say there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He called on NFL team owners to fire any “son of a bitch” player who continued kneeling to protest police brutality. He suggested in a speech to law enforcement officers that maybe they weren’t being rough enough.

“I watch TV every day and that’s all we see, police brutality or the KKK is coming out,” says Aajah. She’d never before felt the sting of racism, at least nothing obvious, but the ferocity of America’s divisions frightens her. She and her friends tallied up their worries as they debated whether their protest would be worth it.

“It just seems like the world is changing, where everything from back then is coming back now,” she says. “It feels like it’s slowly approaching.”

One of Aajah’s mother’s earliest memories, from kindergarten in the early 1980s, is riding in a car just across the state line in South Carolina. She saw men in white with torches lining the streets. The Washingtons are a Christian family, church every Sunday, so young Tiona equated white and flames with godliness, and assumed she was seeing something holy. But Tiona’s mother was trembling, because she knew exactly what sort of people hid under those hoods. So she shouted for her daughter to get low and told her: “If you see those people, you have to fear them.”

Tiona Washington reflects on that moment as a crumbling of childhood innocence, a sudden awareness that some of her fellow Americans hated her because of the colour of her skin. Her own mother learned the same when she became one of the first black students at Rowland’s newly integrated high school in the class of 1971. Edith Washington still remembers teachers making a big show of scrubbing their hands after they touched the black students’ papers, children screaming racial slurs as she walked through the white neighbourhood on her way to school.

The older women had hoped times had changed enough that Aajah would never confront anything similar.

“This is the most lost I’ve felt racially in my entire life,” Tiona Washington says, acknowledging that she, too, almost voted for Trump until the racial undercurrent of the campaign became too strong. “We are seeing things that happened in eras we thought we were past.”

In Rowland, reminders of that darker time remain. Railroad tracks separate two sides of town, and people still refer to them as “the white folks’ section” and “the black folks’ section.” And despite the halting road to progress, black people in this impoverished county are still twice as likely to be poor as whites.

Washington believes real change will only come one person, one small statement, at a time. And so, on that Saturday morning after the game, she told her daughter she was proud of her.

“We’re back at a crossroads,” Washington says. “The question is: Where do we want to go from here?”

Almost three weeks after the protest on his field, South Robeson High School Principal Christopher Clark was still sorting through how he and his school had got so caught up in the tug of war over racial equality and nationalism.

“We’ve got a cultural battle going on for the heart and soul of America,” he says. “We’ve heard, ‘We’re taking this country back.’ Well, where do you want to take it?”

He understands that to some, that might hearken back to the wholesome world of Ozzie and Harriet. But that was also a time when Clark, a Native American, had to go to the pharmacy through the back door.

Clark’s school is in the poorest pocket of one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. The student Aajah Washington listens as her grandmother Edith Washington recalls being one of the first black students at Rowland’s newly integrated high school in 1971 at their home in Rowland, N.C. body is almost entirely minority, split approximately evenly between African-Americans and Native Americans.

Some of his students have never left the county. During a fieldtrip to Fayetteville, he discovered kids who’d never seen an escalator. When “life is so different depending on where your zip code is,” he says, he doesn’t know how anyone can believe that inequality no longer exists, even if he’s not happy about how his cheerleaders chose to demonstrate against it.

A preacher’s son and a devout Christian, Clark would never have knelt had he been a kid on the field that night, and he wouldn’t have allowed his own children to, either. But he doesn’t believe he gets to make those choices for everybody else. Nor did the local school district.

In the wake of the NFL protests, the superintendent had sent out a memo reminding administrators of students’ constitutional right to protest, stating they could not be forced to stand during the anthem or punished for declining to.

Clark tried to explain all of this when the ugly messages arrived.

“You don’t have the guts to lead,” read one note from a friend.

One after the other, the notes kept coming.

Public outrage is not the rule of law, the principal tried to remind folks, but it seemed that many would rather it were.

“When we start down the road of ‘the other’ — the other is wrong, the other is un-American, the other, the other, the other — where will we stop?” he wonders.

“There will be a day when we look back on this and think: What in the world happened to us?”

And so on a Wednesday afternoon before the next home football game, Clark couldn’t help but worry that the cheerleaders practising down the hall would choose to kneel again and start this heartache all over.

The girls had their own worries: that their message was lost amid the anger and condemnation.

At the first game after the protest, homecoming, they decided to stay in the locker-room as the national anthem played.

Then they discussed again what to do at the next. Kneel, and relaunch their mini-culture war? Stay inside, and let it pass?

So they marched out onto the field that next Friday night.

They stood along the sidelines and just held hands, a sign of unity, they hoped, each one of them up on both feet.

No one booed. No one applauded them, either.

The girls turned around, picked up their pompoms and launched their first cheer.

“Go Mustangs!”