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A MUST READ: "What Anybody Can Do." by Jay Greenberg |
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Ek's Note...
I wanted to post this amazing article by Jay Greenberg in my space because it deserves as much attention as anything I can imagine right now. I will be back with a blog at some point, but articles like this are why we are so thrilled to have hall-of-famers like Jay and Kevin writing for us. Please read and share it around.
What Anybody Can Do. by Jay Greenberg
“I had that unfortunate incident (at an exhibition game) during my first year in Philadelphia where I got a banana thrown at me. When I was in the Czech Republic during the lockout, I had fans chanting racial slurs towards me.
“When I was younger, stuff like that used to drive me crazy. I would always try to [respond] physically. But my parents did a good jog of teaching me that you hurt [the bigots] best by putting a couple of pucks in the net so they lose the game. So after awhile it became like ‘whatever,’ didn’t even bother with it anymore, even though I still get (verbal) jabs.
“I’m not an idiot, I can tell when somebody is trying to demean me. But I have a huge support system of family and friends, a lot of good people in my corner of different races and types. That’s how the world works best.”
--Wayne Simmonds to me in The Flyers at 50 in 2016.
Scenes from the last week of the world working at its best:
George Floyd’s heartsick brother appealing for order.
Law enforcement officials kneeling with protestors, offering a shoulder for one to cry on, even walking with them in Flint, Michigan and Camden, New Jersey.
A black protester taking a case of water to what appears from the video to have been a predominantly white police unit in Pittsburgh.
Protesters preventing a looting about to happen.
Perhaps Floyd’s death was a case of four bad and/or bigoted Minneapolis cops who, whatever was in their hearts, almost incomprehensibly hadn’t been properly trained or learned a thing, at least professionally, from the deaths of Eric Garner and Ahmaud Arbery. But not being idiots, we have to believe that racism has not been rooted out of police departments. As twice now Louisville cops who have shot and killed had turned off their body cameras first, in some cities it still may be systemic.
Not being inside these places, we can’t state that for absolute certainty, but do know the absolute truth in this: If what happened to Floyd never does again or not for a long time, it will be because of the worldwide outrage we are seeing from men and women of good will and more than just one skin color.
As for the unfortunate Floyd, an Everyblackman victim of a modern lynching caught in all its terror on cell phone, there are martyrs to any just cause. If their heartbreaking stories force us to take a good, long, look both in the mirror and around us then society betters itself. By inches perhaps, which exacerbates the frustration, but it advances regardless.
In mankind’s long and deadly battle against intolerance, always there have been forces trying to take us backwards. After we elected and re-elected a black U.S. president, a backlash of white fear has the black community fighting uphill again, the last three years a hard slap of a reminder that there still is more distance to go than a lot of us believed or naively wanted to believe, don’t know about you.
If only we would study history, it could keep us from making the same repeated mistakes. Living through these things brings perspective but what does the following generation know? Obviously too many years had passed since the Emancipation Proclamation to make women’s suffrage a no-brainer instead of a hard fight. Brave women had to march. Obviously too few remembered Vietnam to stop us from getting into another one in Iraq.
The protests that engulfed the nation during the sixties and early seventies over an unholy war were heard. We got out of there and the world did not fall to communism afterall, any more than terrorists, real or imagined, have brought us to our knees. Always there has to be a bogeyman.
One would think Vietnam would be a shining lesson for all time of effective social protest. But almost fifty years later, when Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem and raised a fist over the treatment of black persons by the police, the same chorus heard in the sixties of “not the time and place!” drowned out the quarterback’s silent gesture and, outrageously, the career of a good player ended. Only now, because windows are being broken and cop cars are being set afire does the NFL suddenly have a conscience and issue a statement of sadness and understanding of the need for change. Shame on the apparently shameless Roger Goodell.
Hockey’s conscience should be clear. We’re still several birth cycles away from Herb Brooks’s eighties dream of a “generation of Herschel Walkers” on skates. Persons of color in the stands still hardly are prevalent and minority participation on the ice, while growing, still barely past a trickle. But starting with Hockey in Harlem, progressing to Snider Hockey in Philadelphia, the hiring of Willie O’Ree as Diversity Ambassador and making it very clear that slurs will not be tolerated, Gary Bettman, Hockey Canada and USA Hockey have embraced inclusion wholeheartedly.
If that’s simply the case of businessmen doing good business, Bettman will be gone before any real money shows up for any efforts to court minority fandom. And, anyway, business always has advanced the cause of diversity. Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson because the Dodgers wanted to win, society reformation along for the ride, but of course it still was a huge turning point in race relations in our country.
Sports are the ultimate meritocracy, forcing the people who run them to look beyond the offensive stereotypes that have dragged us down. Getting the games back is correctly low on the priority scale these days, their immediate value only as a distraction. In the total scheme of things that is plenty of reason to get them going again in a safe way but they are not going to heal the nation any more than does the presence of national guardsmen.
To, above all else, much more disgusted by the damage than by its underlying causes: Nobody has to excuse burning and looting as any type of instrument of social change to try to understand the essential fuse to this powder keg: Fear and distrust of the authority by which an innocent bystander named George Floyd wound up dead. The unabated toll of these deaths, the backlash against Asian Americans over a pandemic that began in China, are slaps to the face to all of us.
Advances against ignorance are slow and halting. Jim Crow replaced slavery and, 55 years after discrimination was banned by law in the United States, it continues. Heartbreaking, but people are in the streets protesting injustice so slowly, painfully, we still are getting somewhere. One would much rather trust our hearts to the healing process than mere statistics, but as the birth rate in the US has in the last few years dropped below 50 per cent white, inevitably this white rage at the loss of control will diminish.
Unfortunately, it won’t disappear in our lifetime, so to get along better in the world we have to look into our souls. To be a solution you don’t have to take to the streets or Twitter or, like Evander Kane, try to shame Sidney Crosby into joining the cause. That’s up to Sid. But if you hear racism in conversation and don’t make clear it won’t be tolerated in your presence, understand yourself to be part of the problem. As Wayne Simmonds says, and as demonstrated in wonderful moments over an otherwise excruciating past week, support beats anger as the way the world works best.
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