This isn’t surprising at all.
White people never think they are racist, before saying something clearly racist. By all accounts Talha Javaid is a great young man who is helping kids and spending money out of his own pocket to do so, but since he isn’t white he has to deal with BS like this.
Javaid and his best friend Sebastian Nystrom travel to East Lansing, Mich., and pay for ice time out of pocket to provide free clinics and development sessions for players five to eight years of age. His dedication to the sport and to give back to the community was not good enough for one father, identified as Chase, who expressed that he doesn’t “feel comfortable” with his son being coached by a Muslim. Chase was concerned because of the influence Javaid would presumably have on Riley, his child.
In outrageous and ignorant fashion, Chase stated that if Riley was learning how to play cricket, then having Javaid as a coach would be well, more sensical.
Javaid does not, and has never, played cricket.
As a Pakistani-born Canadian Muslim, Javaid is one of the few people of colour in the hockey community in the Windsor-Detroit region. He has played ice hockey and ball hockey since he was a child. Much of his exposure to hockey was from a program at the local mosque called “Fajr Quran Hockey” (FQH) in which young kids go to the mosque for early morning worship and then play ball hockey in the gym downstairs. The Pittsburgh Penguins fan is a full time economics student at the University of Windsor. He volunteers as a hockey coach on weekends. His program has been running for less than a month.
In the text, Chase alluded to the hockey “tradition” that clearly did not include Javaid. He went as far as suggesting that Javaid ought to resign.
“Tradition is coded language for whiteness and the way things have always been,” said Dr. Courtney Szto, assistant professor at the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University and assistant editor of the Hockey in Society blog. “And a Muslim coach throws a wrench into the whole thing. It doesn’t jive with our dominant narrative of who gets to participate in that culture.”
Thankfully, there are a lot of good people in the world and have Javaid’s back.
I can only pray that Riley turns out to be a better person than his dad.
Flip the page for the disgusting text messages and some of the support Javaid has received.