I grew up loving sports. I was a baseball kid until I was a basketball kid until I was a tennis kid until I was a football kid. Through every transition I knew that sports were going to be the pinnacle of mano y mano competition for me. No chess club or mock trial victory ever filled me with the pride of a sports win. Tonight I discovered that Grambling University did the unthinkable. The players on the GU football team quit. They are refusing to play tomorrow’s game against Jackson State. In fact, they are refusing to play another snap moving forward until things at the school turn around. I was shocked. Then I started reading about it more and thinking back on some of the conversations I’ve had at conferences geared towards recruiting minority professors. That is when I discovered the story within the story.
Grambling is a historically black college with a longstanding history. The school has struggled over the years to maintain its aura of collegiate pride. See, faculty don’t want to come to Grambling, and the political infighting there between what is commonly known as the new and the old black aristocracy are waging an open war across the quad. Long story short: Black kids aren’t preferring black colleges any more. Tag this to a sinking economy and a broken dynamic between athletics and academics and you get this mess.
The very reason for creating race-based scholarships was to infuse the traditionally homogenous colleges with much needed diversity. Educators believed that a diverse student population better served the learning of individual students. I agree with this philosophy. On the other hand, I understand why the African American population–a group that was first formed almost wholly out of the slave trade–would want to have a place to capture and reflect on a racial identity that we were denied the opportunity to realize for so long. So yeah, I get the need for institutions like Grambling, but the majority of the community it aims to preserve does not. As a result, the institution is in serious decline, and the football team is serving as a reminder of the longstanding legacy of black pride by doing what my forefathers did: Protesting for what we believe in.