As a member of an overrepresented community, I physically cannot refrain from sharing my perspective. I’ve been paying enough attention to the national movement that started in Minneapolis – mainly because images of the latest racist murders committed by police are making it hard for me to find and like photos of my friends defying social distancing guidelines on their boats – to determine that I have an opinion on the situation that everyone needs to acknowledge: me and my friends and family would be a lot more comfortable if you just stuck to nonviolent protests (and also maybe didn’t do too many of those, either).
Four hundred years of enslavement, exploitation, disenfranchisement, and state-sponsored murder and brutality doesn’t justify what we’ve seen in almost every American city these past few weeks. You know what does justify a good round of rock-throwing, bat-swinging, and car-torching? Winning (or even losing… whatever!) a college basketball game.
It really doesn’t matter what happened in the game itself; all that matters is that me and my buddies were drunk and the tuition and taxpayer dollars of other students and community members paid for our fun night of destruction. And don’t worry, it’s not like white students at elite universities are the only group of Americans that can commit criminal acts with little to no consequences!
Look, take it from a recreational rioter: you can’t do this stuff without upsetting people, but the way we approach things is just easier to tolerate and laugh off. We’re not here to challenge the corruption and racism at the core of American policing; we’re just here to set your property on fire to mark the end of a two-hour sporting event. How can anyone be mad at us when we can’t remember what we did and, most importantly, never made our parents and friends squirm at the thought of having to confront their own privilege and biases?
Listen, me and my buddies are tired of everything being so political these days – we just want to go back to quoting Joe Rogan’s second podcast with Elon Musk while equating COVID-19 to the flu. And we would also appreciate it if the NCAA could reopen college sports over the summer so we can spend a couple nights here and there razing small businesses without fear of getting tear-gassed, arrested, or killed.
Oh, and the irony of our obsessive fandom of our school’s mostly black basketball team and our total disregard for the well-being of the black community is, you guessed it, lost on us.
