Playing a “white person’s game,” an all-black rugby team from a Washington charter school has cleared racial hurdles and learned valuable life lessons.
WASHINGTON — The rugby practice field at Hyde Leadership Public Charter School bears little resemblance to the manicured lawns of the English boarding school where the sport was born. It is more brown than green, and sirens sometimes drown out the shouts of players. Then there are the occasional interruptions, like when play was briefly halted during a recent practice as a man darted about wildly on a nearby street, calling football plays and evading imaginary tacklers.
But this patch of mud and grass is more than the home of what is believed to be the nation’s first all-African-American high school rugby team. It is also where a growing number of students have been exposed to a sport they once knew nothing about and to parts of society that once seemed closed to them.
Hyde players have a hard time explaining rugby to friends who do not attend their school and who do not know much about the sport. Others say things like, “You’re crazy, that’s a white person’s sport,” said Lawrenn Lee, a senior on the team. One parent, Clifford Lancaster, recalled his reaction when his son Salim announced he was going to play: “My eyes got this big. I said, ‘That’s a wild sport.’ ”The man most responsible for all of this is Tal Bayer, 38.
Corporate Media works hard to maintain the meme of white hierarchial advantage by dramatizing the myth of the benevolent white man taming and civilizing the primal power of young blacks by bestowing upon them entre to the glorified bastions of white male exclusivity and implied privilege.
Fuck a Rugby. Is being an "The Nations First All Black Rugby Team" really an honor? Is it special? Is it something to be proud of? Where's the "The Nations First All White Double Dutch Squad"? Where's "The Nation's First All Jewish Break Dancing Crew"? Why the assumption that playing Rubgy ... is some kind of step up?
5 comments:
it's plain for everybody to see what it did for these here Indians......,
You are an idiot. this story is nothing more than an example of barriers being broken down through the introduction a game. It is not part of some master plan to perpetuate white myths. Is it an honor to be the first "all black" rugby team? considering some of the hurdles and challenges that these kids overcome both in and out of the community, it is a sense of pride and honor to be a part of.
For further interest their has been coverage of all white "step teams" and double dutch. So pull your head out.
Yeah, I wouldn't put my name on no stoopid shit like that neither. Go 'head anon. Work that.
"their has been coverage of all white "step teams" and double dutch"
There has been? In a NATIONALLY-syndicated media like the Jew York Times???
I can see this getting some local coverage, but does it really warrant NATIONAL coverage? This is only high school sports, for gawdsakes...
If otherwise, please link your source?
And of course there was the first white Morehouse valedictorian.
Mainstream editors and reporters, ill-inclined to dig deeply into the cold muck of America's racial hangups, gravitates instead towards useless feel-good bullshit like the rugby story.
Hollywood does likewise, like with that movie about the black championship swim team or the first black Heisman Trophy winner, etc.
It's candy, that's all it is.
Post a Comment