Life more than a game for Black athletes
The Sept. 12 Clemson-Wake Forest game in Winston-Salem, N.C., that led to commentary by former Clemson player Dante Stewart Credit: AP/Walt Unks
Dante Stewart, possessed of a very fine Black mind, knows what it’s like to be seen as nothing more than a Black body.
A decade ago, Stewart, 28, was playing cornerback for Clemson University after a stellar gridiron career at Calhoun County High School. Now he is a writer and a minister, studying at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.
And today he is a bit more famous than he was a week ago, after his commentary on an ugly controversy went viral.
Friday, the day before Clemson’s opener against Wake Forest, the university tweeted the message "Playing with a purpose" along with pictures of team helmets with four stickers players could wear the following day. Two of the messages were versions of "Black Lives Matter," while another said "Love" and the last read "Equality."
Some of the voluminous response was supportive, but much of it was hateful. One typical tweet read, "Thanks for giving me a heads up to not bother watching. College football is the LAST place I want to see this political BS ... we have it shoved in our faces every single direction all the time & football should be a place we come to just enjoy and get away from it all for a bit."
The attitude is common. Thursday at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium before the Chiefs/Texans game, a moment when players from both teams locked arms to celebrate unity after the playing of the traditional and Black national anthems was booed by many of the 16,000 fans in attendance.
Stewart, who has written for publications from The Washington Post to Christianity Today, was upset about the Clemson controversy, and responded with a blog entry, "Dear White Clemson Fan," that eviscerated those who’d attacked the helmet messages for demanding the team’s Black players be simply silent bodies offered up for their entertainment, with no right to speak up.
"It’s so interesting that so many of you want Black bodies to perform well for you — as one white Clemson fan recently put it, Saturday is my time," Stewart wrote. "But when it comes to those Black bodies standing in solidarity with other Black bodies, then somehow it’s a distraction."
Growing up in South Carolina, as Stewart and I did, you are asked to accept a heinous lie as truth. We were taught that what the North did to the confederacy during and after the Civil War was too tragic to be forgotten, but that Black people have no reason to dwell on slavery or the soul-crushing domination of Jim Crow segregation, or the systemic racism still plaguing us.
"There are so many things Black athletes have always wanted to say but cannot," Stewart said in a phone interview. "To speak out was called selfish because it detracted from the only goal we were allowed to have in the role we played for white fans, victory for their team."
All last week there were tributes to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that many of Clemson’s white fans were deeply moved by, because that is something they rightly believe we should never forget. But Clemson, had it wanted to, could have commemorated another 9/11 event, albeit not from 2001.
It was on that day in 1971 that Melvin Reese became the first Black man to play in a football game for Clemson University. It staggers me that Clemson’s football team was still all-white when I was born.
And it reminds us that racism and sports are inextricably linked in this nation, and demanding that Black players sacrifice not just their bodies on the field, but their principles, too, is shameful.
Lane Filler is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
