To all you UT alums, students, and lovers, I’m just here to say that quite a few of your boosters are snowflakes who want to turn back the clock to the ’60s — the 1860s. My advice to you and everyone else who appreciates diversity is to show your support for the Black athletes who nonviolently (sad I even have to point that out) protested the fight song this football season. Do whatever you can to let them know you got their back. Buy some Longhorn season tickets or a Longhorn cap or something. Send a tweet. And to any Black athlete considering bringing your talents to Austin, you might want to think twice. This is an institution run by a coterie of likely racist crackers who want to punish you for exercising your freedom of speech. If the eyes of anything are upon us, I’m sure they don’t like what they see.
After it was announced the Longhorn Band would not play the “Eyes of Texas” after the Baylor game, because the song has roots in minstrel shows and is connected to a saying by some Civil War loser, snowflake Linden R. Welsch (class of ’69) wrote UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell, saying, “You tell those ‘students’ who don’t want to play, they are out of the band and let the others play. This is the same problem you have with the football team. You have let the inmates run the asylum. You let political correctness/social justice or whatever take over and have lost control. It is stupid and demonstrates a total lack of leadership.”
Good ol’ Lindy boy was one of nearly 75 alumni and donors who threatened to pull their financial support if UT scrubbed the “Eyes of Texas.”
The snowflakes got their way. The “Eyes of Texas” isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, Hartzell reassured the precious, precious, oh-how-dear whiners.
In the meantime, Black blue chippers should strongly consider taking their skills and smarts elsewhere. Any school that still celebrates Civil War losers is no place for a young Black person, especially when so many other schools, especially HBCUs, emphasize diversity and inclusion and when so many care that racism from a time when racism was accepted is still racism. Let’s see how well an all-white Longhorn football team does against an integrated Ohio State squad or even an integrated Directional Flyover State U team. It goes without saying the basketball games would have to be severely handicapped.
Am I being racist? Am I saying that Blacks are genetically predisposed toward athletics? I hope not, because we all know that sports represent a meaningful way for people trapped in poverty by centuries of systemic racism to transcend their surroundings and thrive. We also know that systemic racism is what forces Black students toward athletics as a means of gaining acceptance socially and institutionally.
Anyone who has taught in a U.S. high school system, writes critic/filmmaker Charles Tonderai Mudede, knows that a “balance” — black dominance on the ballfield and white dominance in the classroom — is “strictly imposed on black males [by authority]. Intellectuality is not just discouraged but not even recognized. When you reinforce this attitude by underfunding education, the remaining opportunities for Black success are not found in the classroom but in the gym.”
Overrepresentation of Blacks in sports is a manifestation of “a disastrous feedback loop,” Mudede continues. “There are no black Jobs or Gates or Bezos, but there are a lot of [Kaepernicks] and Jameses. As a consequence, a position in the NBA or NFL has the appearance of being more realistic than a position at Amazon. And the poorer you are, the more practical the impractical looks.”
Let’s be clear about one thing. People clinging to this country’s racist origins may not necessarily be racist, but they are espousing racist ideas, which is pretty much the definition of tacit racism. I’ve heard all the arguments. Everyone who lived in Texas back then had no choice but to back the gray. Grow up in a brainwashed house, become brainwashed yourself. Try to raise a family surrounded by (armed) racists (with badges), go along with racist policy. I understand that. Our problem is specific to relics of this country’s racist history, even more specifically statues, monuments, and even collegiate fight songs. What is hardly ever mentioned when we talk about them is that all of them were created/erected by pissed-off whites who wanted to reestablish their alleged superiority over a class of Black folks who had just earned their citizenship. In a country where we should be surrounded by statues of great abolitionists and Union leaders like Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, Perry Downs, and Fort Worth’s very own Anthony Bewley, we are instead inundated with Robert E. Lee and other racist losers. Whoever said “history is written by the winners” must not have been around for the U.S. Civil War. Our winners are hardly anywhere to be seen.
There is no reason Robert E. Lee and his ilk need to be honored anywhere in these United States, a place of diverse exceptionalism that was built on the backs of slaves and continues to blossom through our working class. Our country is better with more voices, with more experiences, with more perspectives. Diversity equals dynamism, which equals enlightenment. Anyone who goes on to defend Confederate-related statues might not be openly racist but probably harbors ideas of white exceptionalism and is to be avoided or, if related by blood or marriage, coached up. In my life, as the father of a young Black male, I would never let my son go near a campus with a fight song from our racist past. The North won the war. The slaves were freed. Blacks became citizens. Anything else is just racist claptrap.
