Today in my Women in Sport class, we had two guest speakers Carla Coffey (the head track coach here at Smith) and Billy McBride (the assistant athletic director at Amherst College in Amherst, MA). Both a people of a color, and our topic was on racism and sexism in sport. Recently I have been talking a lot with Carla about issues of racism and sexism due to the problem I encountered at the beginning of this semester, so for the most part I know her views, and we both experience an unbiased type of racism everyday just by being a part of the Smith community.
However this post is not about them. If you want to chat more about it, feel free to contact me. In the middle of our panel, our professor told us a story that the Dean of Graduate Students (Danielle Ramduth), also a woman of color, relayed to her a few days ago. Danielle's 7 year old daughter attends the Smith Campus School, and recently came home crying because the kids wouldn't pick her for different activities to be on their "team." They told her if she could make her skin a little more "white" then they would consider choosing her next time. This story instantly fueled a sense of anger in me because as many times as we'd like to think that racism no longer exist in the world, obviously it still does. These kids are only 7 years old, and this is the environment that they are being brought up in. As a future parent, I had tears in my eyes thinking about how I would react in the situation and what my response to my child would be. I know what it's like to be the only black person in a situation...it's pretty much what I face everyday. But to know that my child is being discriminated against because of the color of their skin is just horrifying. I am grown so in a sense I know how to deal with such issues...but a child? It's extremely disheartening to know that this type of actions still exist, and that not much has truly changed in the last half century. So as parents...what do we do? How do we handle such a situation?
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