Last month not a whole lot of people knew who Jonathan Butler was. Now he is the man who led a football team to not play and a university system to its knees. I am of course, talking about the Missouri situation. When I think about the term discrimination I see it as a form of bullying. It is one group deciding to tell another smaller group what they can and can’t do and where they can and can’t do it.
Externally, we don’t deal with discrimination and bullying all too well. The moment Americans ‘don’t feel safe’ that is a signifier that bad times are ahead for the place where we don’t feel safe. It is quickly followed by that foreign population telling us to go away. However, if someone tells America to go somewhere else, we will invade your country, take your oil, and then build you a bunch of new stuff so our corporations actually do feel comfortable staying right where they are. Of course there’s money involved there, so we are fundamentally invested in the financial outcome as a capitalist society.
I feel like the tide has fundamentally shifted internally. Nowadays when someone says, ‘I don’t feel safe’ we tell them to go somewhere else. It is as if we suddenly believe that if you don’t feel safe in one place or one section of our vast nation then instead of confronting the problem you should get up and move somewhere you do feel safe. The situation in Missouri was (and continues to be) that black students faced a great deal of discrimination and the authorities refused to do anything significant about it. The situation was treated simply as ‘how things are’ in Mizzou. That is, until the largely black football team decided to stop playing. This became such a big deal that even Fox News had to tell the tale–though the bold faced headline they led with touted the protestors as the problem.
I don’t pretend to know all of the details in the Missouri situation, but I know that we are a nation literally founded on civil disobedience. I find it ironic that the same people who tout the Boston Tea Party as a core moment in the birth of our nation look so disparagingly upon a group of ball players saying they won’t play until conditions are right. I guess when it affects something that matters to you, the way you perceive things change dramatically.