The university police stationed at the top of the away team’s bleachers were a dead giveaway. As I left the Mizzou Softball Complex, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was leaving behind one of those situations that I’ve heard so much about in my life.
“This is what racial profiling looks like in person.”
On a sunny April Sunday afternoon in Columbia, Missouri, an innocuous trip to watch a Mizzou versus Louisiana State softball game took on the shade of something far cloudier, and it had very little to do with the competition on the field. In the stands during the third game of the weekend series, an African American male LSU fan was being accosted by multiple middle-aged white Missouri fans because he’d committed the heinous crime of being too spirited for too long within their earshot. Loud and passionate though he was, he wasn’t being rude, engaging other fans or even denigrating Mizzou at all; it was as if he were cheering in his own living room, except in public. His incessant chatter may have been somewhat annoying, but he was doing what sports fans do, and I’d seen Mizzou fans do the same thing at this very stadium on multiple occasions. To wit, Mizzou has an official cheering section at many sporting events called the Antlers, whose only job is to heckle opposing teams and fans, routinely saying things far worse than anything he said. So what made him different?
I’d missed games 1 and 2 but had learned beforehand that some variation of the same scene had unfolded in those games as well: A guy’s stereotypical “loud blackness” eventually grates on a few other fans in seats around him — and in some cases, not even around him — and these fans then find a trivial complaint to levy against him to the ushers, which in turn creates a scene. He in turn protests the sudden negative attention, and the aforementioned fans can now say what they really feel about him behind the wall of an authority figure.
The sudden rush of indignity that hit me was foreign yet all too familiar as an African American. This was not an experience I’d ever personally had, which I acknowledge is atypical in the life of minorities in 2021 America. Seeing how easily it snuck up on me in a place I’d been many times before, I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I’d taken my personal privilege for granted for so long. I never forget that such naked discrimination is always just an arm’s length away from me at best, but I’d been operating under the hope — nay, the naive assumption — that sports were the great equalizer. It seems that what I’d mistaken as warm acceptance of my fellow fandom all of these years had really only been tacit compliance under probation.
Missouri has long had an issue with racial relations, even in a seemingly politically blue city such as Columbia. But what happened at that game was more than just a disagreement between fan bases. It was, in many ways, an encapsulation of the power struggle and racial dynamic that has come to the forefront in America in the last decade or so: white privilege and discomfort leveraged against the boldness and existence of minorities in spaces previously thought to be predominantly white. This is not the first racially charged incident I’ve seen at Mizzou, but it’s also not the Mizzou family with whom I’ve come to associate myself for all these years. It stands as an enormous credit to the friends I was sitting with, along with a smattering of other Mizzou fans, that they spoke up vehemently in the gentleman’s defense when he was being harassed, despite his allegiance to the opposing team. The whole scene was dumbfounding to watch, and I couldn’t fathom how poorly it must have gone for this gentleman in the previous games, though I was very proud of those who showed themselves to be true allies. The strength and fortitude it must have taken for that man to eschew his apprehension from knowing he was likely unwelcome — or even potentially endangered — after the first heated game are far beyond what anyone could have reasonably asked. I can’t applaud him enough for having the courage to show up again and be so unabashedly himself, time and again — damn the consequences.
It is entirely possible that this was an isolated incident. But to assume so makes it easy to do nothing about them. To disregard these incidents as pure coincidence is dangerously cavalier at best and infuriatingly flippant at worst. Yes, one objectively could look at the events that day and say, “Why play the race card? No one there said it was because he was Black.”
But that’s just it — these things are often unspoken so as to shroud the true prejudice. Defenders of the status quo ask why we must often conflate the two things. But as an African American man in 21st-century America, I’d ask them how they could possibly divorce the two.
I attended high school at a mostly-white private school in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy; I’m not new to the proximity of racial prejudice in my life. But for better or worse — and at this point, I’m beginning to think it’s the latter — I’ve been fortunate enough to not have seen many instances in broad daylight with my own two eyes.
How ironic, then, that it would be when I was so far away from my home that I’d have an experience that would hit so close to it.
