Exclusion lies at heart of hockey’s culture problem
Cold arenas, stinking skates, scheduling conflicts, bits of travel. It was London, Ont., this weekend for my son’s peewee hockey tournament.
The past six years have moved me from reluctance (hating the cold, fearing injuries) to grudging acceptance (seeing the pleasure it brings my son) to an appreciation of what being in a team teaches him (learning to pass the puck being most important).
We’ve aimed high, hoping the kid will turn his training lessons into life skills and grow into a decent beer-league player. This would have been equally true of any team sport, but hockey and soccer are what we had best access to.
As our son’s coach, my husband received a Hockey Canada mandated “Speak Out” training on sexual abuse, bullying, intimidation and discrimination with significant focus on gender, acceptance of gender fluidity and respecting pronouns. Coaches then train the kids on this. Peewee itself is soon to be called U13 (Under 13). You could say hockey is starting to undergo a thaw from within the confines of conformity.
“Starting.” That’s a key pointer to the inadequacy of training that does not specifically include racism.
Whether in London or multicultural Toronto, hockey arenas are terrifically white spaces. I see a few brown faces, a few Asian faces and very, very few Black faces. A contrast to, say, the Raptors celebrations I took my kids to in the summer.
This isn’t news, but it’s the exclusion that lies at the heart of whiteness in hockey culture.
And so, when a coach is called out for using a racial slur on a player — as was Calgary Flames now-former coach Bill Peters, for saying the N-word repeatedly to former NHL-er Akim Aliu 10 years ago — it’s not just about the unkind cut to the person at the receiving end.
A slur is just the tip of ugly devaluation whose reverberations are felt all the way down to the peewee and atom and novice levels.
This is what renders the tears of people such as Flames general manager Brad Treliving so jarring, so meaningless in arenas where talent is developed. They convert an institutionalized problem into a personal one, and let Hockey Canada and provincial sports organizations escape scrutiny of their policies.
Those tears also siphon off sympathy and focus from the real victims of racism. Look how hard it was for him — for Treliving, the rich white guy atoning for another’s sins. Look how sincere he was. In a particularly tone-deaf moment, Treliving even called it the toughest week of his career.
I see the punditry piling on Peters, but where is the impatience with Treliving’s selfserving response?
Racism isn’t just about mean individuals saying cruel things. But as a society, we prefer to recognize it as only that, and deal with the issue much like we would a used tissue — dispose of it and be done with it.
There is a pattern to how these situations play out, and Peters’ case was laughably by the book.
Man in position of power says overtly racist things. Man is (unusually) called out. Man, used to being an authority figure, usually denies the accusation or adopts a wait-and-see approach.
This is also usually the time to discredit the accuser. But hold on, other voices chime in (in this case, with allegations of physical abuse). Enter the #MeToo effect. Oops, does racism put jobs at risk these days? Man meets 2019 impatience. Man, confidence now shaken, issues corporate apology: Dear boss, sincere apology — to you. “It was isolated” — never said it before, never after. “Immediately regrettable incident” — I just forgot to include the guy in my apology 10 years ago, and again today. It was “made in a moment of frustration” — we all become a little bit racist in those moments, right? “I meant no disrespect” — truth! I just say words that denigrate a race, whose subjugation I benefit from, without meaning anything by it. “I have regretted the incident since it happened” — please, please don’t sack me.
But 2019 wins. Man is sacked. It’s called a resignation.
Cue the tears. In this case, Bill was gone, Brad cried. See, we’re all good people. This is why good people push back against criticism of the tears and the painting of hockey culture as racist. They continue to see it through that narrow lens of interpersonal racism and therefore as an assault on the personal niceness of hockey-playing families.
In reality, it’s not about the malign intent of individual families — although by all accounts, there are overt racists among them yelling slurs from the sidelines.
The criticism of hockey culture is partly about what I call cruelty by indifference; how little people notice who is absent in the crowd around them, how little they think of reining in the overt racists. But even if a few parents were to feel moved enough by the injustice of exclusion, there isn’t much that individuals can do.
It is mostly about driving institutions to stop excluding people. If sports organizations can mandate training for coaches, they can certainly mandate outreach into Black communities and a code of conduct for coaches, officials — and families — with zero tolerance for racism including discriminatory calls by referees.
Anti-racism that goes beyond an exhortation to treat everybody equally should be the norm well before kids turn into pro athletes.
This is also only a starting point in addressing racial abuse, but it’s a launching point for a game that is long overdue for a cultural transformation.