You will hear this a lot of people (mostly from white people) say the Missouri football players should stick to sports and racism doesn’t really exists.
They will say people are just using the race card to make something out of nothing. I urge those people to read what Cynthia Frisby an associate professor in the Missouri School of Journalism had to say about her experience at Mizzou over the years.
Here is just a portion of it.
I have lived in Columbia and been at the university for almost 18 years. During this time, I have been called the n-word too many times to count.
My most recent experience was while jogging on Route K in May of 2015 when I was approached by a white man in a white truck with a Confederate flag very visible and proudly displayed.
He leaned out his window (now, keep in mind I run against traffic, so his behavior was a blatant sign that something was about to happen). Not only did he spit at me, he called me the n-word and gave me the finger.
I wrote about my experiences being called the n-word twice while I was on my jog. And yes, I have had a few faculty call me the n-word and treat me with incredible disrespect. Yes, faculty.
I have had a student who said he couldn’t call me Dr. Frisby because that would mean that he thinks I am smart, and he was told that blacks are not smart and do not earn degrees without affirmative action. Yes, true story. I have so many stories to share that it just doesn’t make sense to put them all here.
The saddest of all things for me is to see how a few of my white friends are responding to these events and basic conflicts in race relations in our nation (i.e., police shootings, the President, etc). It hurts my heart when I see posts from these friends who make fun of us because we find things hurtful like dressing up in black face costumes or Confederate flags flying high in my neighborhood.
People (especially some white people) want to bury their heads in the sand about the racism and pretend prejudice doesn’t exist in this country.
They can’t fathom how a cop could kill a black person without blinking an eye or how someone could be spit on while jogging just because they are black.
But, that is our reality as black people and something we live with every day of our lives regardless if we are successful or educated. We are still black and that is still a problem for a lot of people in this country.
Open your eyes to what is really going on and you might be surprised at what you see.