A reflection on understanding racism
After decades as a white man covering sports, understanding racism is all about realizing that you really don’t know what you don’t know
You can only know what you know, so it’s important to want to know more.
So, in this time of severe crisis, it’s imperative, even for a guy who’s spent the bulk of a long career around Black professional athletes, to listen more carefully than ever. To try to learn from what is being said, and asked, at this very moment, by those athletes. To know more about things you could never have experienced directly.
White men of privilege who never personally encounter racism must learn more about it from those who have and speak to their audience about it. Over the past few days, that has been requested, in their own way, by hockey player Evander Kane and Ticats’ Larry Dean and Simoni Lawrence, among many others.
If you have a forum, they suggest, use it to speak and I assume daily column space counts.
I ruminated on that after the sports editor asked me what had changed, either for better or worse, during the many decades I’ve been around the Canadian Football League and, for a shorter but still lengthy time, Major League Baseball.
Mostly what you know is from what you’ve experienced directly or with your eyes and ears. So, on the surface, what I see is that AfricanAmerican athletes now encounter less overt, in-your-face racism than when I first started covering pro sport. But I don’t know for sure, because it’s not a lived experience for me. Athletes often remind me of that, as they should.
I will say, though, that any racism in and around Canadian football has become more silent and implied. And that it’s still there. In a conversation this week, Lawrence said Canadians should be careful in the choice of every word we use. Real communication is not always about what’s said but is always about what’s heard. And, to many
Black players, past associations can make some words — for example, “thug” to describe a man who plays close to the edge and sometimes crosses it — land with a far different context on the listener than the speaker may intend.
As Hall of Famer George Reed publicly pointed out more than 60 years ago, Canadians get far too smug about racism. We think because it has always been so blatant and violent to the south of us, we are immune by comparison. But you only have to look to our First Nations people to counter that selfrighteous complacency. To his credit, CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie messaged not only support for CFL players this week but also that Canada has its own issues with racism and the league has not always been perfect.
Ambrosie does point out that countless African-Americans have come north for the chance to play they weren’t getting at home and that many have gratefully remained and become Canadian citizens. He’s absolutely right, but let’s not overlook that, like the early Blue Jays and their young Black Dominicans players, the teams’ primary motivation was not altruism but deepening the talent pool.
A few years removed from heavy involvement in Major League Baseball, I don’t know really know how its Black players are now being treated in Toronto but I suspect it’s with fairness and dignity. It’s usually been that way because Toronto is considered in many studies to be the most culturally diverse city in the world and the Jays got off to a good organizational start 40 years ago.
That was what I saw in 10 years inside and outside the Jays’ lockerroom. But, there were many people still around who had been subjected to overt racism and they were all over the American League.
Toronto’s 1987 AL MVP George Bell was usually suspicious of people partly, I think, because of racism he encountered as a 19-year-old in Montana and South Carolina in the Philadelphia Phillies’ low minors. Manager Cito Gaston often confided in me about losing a minorleague batting title on what he still believed was a racially motivated scoring decision. I listened and despaired, but could not fully relate.
In football, I played junior for Uly Curtis, who’d been the Argos’ first Black player. He loved his afterlife in Toronto, but had experienced some subtle racism in the community. In a move that many felt had racial undertones, legendary Bernie Custis was shifted to halfback by the Tiger-Cats in 1952 after he’d become the first African-American to quarterback a pro team full time. Custis, though, never really ventured into that discussion, at least in public, and felt loved here.
The all-time Ticat Angelo Mosca hid his mixed-race heritage, even from his family, until only a few years ago because of what he’d faced in the U.S. and assumed he might encounter here. Yes, we were both in tears as he told me about it, but the difference was he’d been there ... I hadn’t.
Cookie Gilchrist rejected his election to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame because of what he viewed as racism against him in Hamilton and Toronto. Some early GMs had quotas on African-Americans and other CFL stars over the years have complained of being treated well within the game but being met by various discriminations in the outside community.
Even last August, some Ticats players encountered what they considered a racist situation at a Hamilton establishment, but would not discuss it afterward.
Overall, players of all races and colours here tend to speak very highly of the Ticats organization’s inclusive culture.
So, to me, racism does not seem now to be overt or systemic in the CFL ... but my shoes are only on my own feet. You don’t really know what you don’t know. I’ve learned to listen to players about “coded” language and that subtle racism still exists, and I’m still learning. And, as eloquently prompted by athletes this week, I should listen even more deeply to experiences lived and more loudly transmit the message.