Beginning on September 24, 2015, the
University of Missouri held a numerous amount of public protests against school
president Timothy Wolfe due to his inability to act on a dangerous racial
climate within the campus. Some of these
incidents included racial slurs and consistent discrimination which could only
be described as acts of intimidation.
However, one of the biggest problems with this situation is that the school
only reacted when the football team became involved. The reasons for this is obvious, as a main
source of revenue for the Missouri’s board of operations, alumni support is
crucial for the university. But what
exactly does this mean? It means that the school valued monetary gain rather
than the encouragement of a safe campus for African Americans. In fact, all that the African American
student association asked for was consequences for those who committed acts of
racial discrimination. In response,
Timothy Wolfe continued to ignore their demands and nothing was achieved. It seems this is consistent theme in today’s
society where we doubt and diminish the severity of racial discrimination within
college campus’s. Again moving back to
the football team protest, I believe another reason for Wolfe’s eventual
resignation was the media uproar within the African American community. I believe in our current climate; media has
become an essential tool in bringing to light issues that might have been
previously swept under the rug. Despite
this, it should be the school’s responsibility to understand the sensitive
atmosphere that African American’s must experience on an every day basis. What is commendable however, is that the
football team understood their platform as a powerful tool against this
injustice. Looking at Civil Rights Activists
studied in our class, many of them were not afforded the privilege of this
platform, as a result the football team played an essential part in
illustrating societal racism.
I think this case provides an interesting opportunity to examine the monetization of black bodies. I'm certainly not the first one to make this argument (being from Missouri and most of my high school classmates having gone to Mizzou, I heard it mulitple times during this controversy), but the value placed in the opinion of only those black people--not coincidentally men, doing what is essentially physical labor--who financially sustain the university through their efforts and are little compensated, at least monitarily. I by no means mean to say that Mizzou's employment of black football players is akin to slavery, but just that a similar logic to the one that was expliciitly expressed in slavery (of the value of black people and their interests being determined exclusively by the economic value of their labor) implicitly informs the decisions of Mizzou's administration in this case.
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