Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired on Monday. I rarely say things like this, but he should have been fired days ago. Fitzgerald ruled over a program that will go down as one of the worst we’ve seen in recent years, and it doesn’t matter if he knew about the abuses or not. He was the boss. He needed to go. Good riddance.
We knew about the disgraceful accusations of hazing, and those are bad enough, but I want to focus on another part of the story that was written about by The Daily Northwestern on Monday. It detailed extensive racism Black and brown players say they faced in the late 2000s.
What these players said should cause everyone in the Northwestern community, every teacher, every alumnus, every human being who considers themselves a Wildcat, to ask a basic question: How did this happen?
Specifically, how did a school, supposedly so progressive, allow such hardcore racism to fester for so long inside its football program, and seemingly did nothing about it until the student newspaper outed the program?
One of the things about racism is that it doesn’t care about borders or state lines (most viruses don’t). It excels at seeking out the weak-minded and ignorant and can be easily engineered into a weapon against the vulnerable. It lives everywhere: in our economic systems, in our politics and in our hearts. What it does well, what it does really well, is travel under a cloak to places you’d think it might not exist, like the Northwestern football program.
Pat Fitzgerald stood against unionization in college sports. It could have saved his job.
We think of out-of-control programs happening at football factories, like an SEC school or some storied program in the West. But the reported issues we know now plagued Northwestern show how hazing, mixed with bigotry, can happen anywhere, even academic, non-football factory places like this program.
This isn’t the state of Florida. This is Evanston, Illinois.
Anyone who understands this country well knew it was only a matter of time before accusations of racism emerged from this absolutely putrid story. When you hire a turd to be your head coach, someone who doesn’t care about the well-being of his players, racism was bound to enter the chat.
The point is that Northwestern is supposed to be better than this. It’s not supposed to have this type of alleged white nationalist culture as part of its football program. But it did. And if you think the phrase white nationalist doesn’t apply here, or is harsh, you are wrong.
This quote to The Daily Northwestern from a former Wildcat player is both infuriating and telling. Read it carefully and tell me it doesn’t scream an attempt to destroy one person’s culture to favor only a white one.
The Daily Northwestern interviewed Ramon Diaz Jr., who is Latino, and played for the program from 2005-2008. He said the culture at Northwestern was hostile to him as a non-white player.
“I didn’t feel like I could be anything other than white,” Diaz said. “We never felt like we could be ourselves. We had to fit in by being white or acting white or laughing at our own people.”
When a young human being says something like this, well, it’s devastating. And extremely telling.
This culture secretly festered because people, perhaps well-meaning people, didn’t think this type of racism existed at Northwestern. At least not to this degree. This is Northwestern, for goodness sake, liberal school, cool people, progressive. Barack Obama is building his presidential center a short distance away from the campus. It doesn’t get more person of color-y than the first Black president.
The Daily Northwestern interviewed three former football players who described multiple racist incidents from coaches and players when they were with the team in the late 2000s. The incidents alleged describe a program that seemed stuck in the 1970s. The racism they outline is ugly and profane but most noticeably, it seems purposeful; almost designed, the way an architect plots corners and angles when creating building plans.
According to players who spoke to the Daily Northwestern, Black players were asked to cut their long hair, their dreads, while white players were not required to cut their hair if it was long.
One player added: “There was a certain culture of enabling racism and other microaggressions that I had to experience and that other offensive linemen that were people of color had to experience.”
Diaz said he was asked by an offensive line coach if he knew how to clean a dirty room. The coach added a racist joke about how Diaz’s family must know how to clean houses, Diaz told the Daily Northwestern.
One player said the team was segregated by race, with Black players on the defensive side of the ball and white ones on offense. This type of thinking is hardcore racist and goes back decades. The belief some (racist) coaches have is that offensive players are smarter and must be white, and the defensive side of the ball is more about speed and athleticism, and that’s where you stash all the Black players.
This is some of the ugliest hierarchical racism you see in sports, and it was at Northwestern.
Again, racism travels well. It’s a member of every frequent flyer program. It’s not a shock it’s at Northwestern; at least for those of us who live in the real world.
But Northwestern, at least in part, was able to get away with it because people at the school didn’t look, and they didn’t look because they didn’t think they had to.
That is the saddest part of this story, but it’s the realest.
