Don’t pretend you don’t know why this is happening. Don’t try to make excuses for them. If you are not vocally and unequivocally against it then you are part of the problem.
Not all hockey fans are racist. In fact, most of us probably aren’t. But of all the team logos that could appear at a white supremacists demonstration, no one is really surprised that it’s from hockey. There’s a group of fans calling themselves the “Detroit Right Wings” marching through Charlottesville, VA with torches and shields bearing the Detroit Red Wings logo. The team has made a statement against it and is pursuing legal action but this isn’t going to change people’s minds. We’ve been dancing around this issue for decades: some NHL fans are racist and it’s time for it to stop.
Hockey is still thought of as one of the whitest sports. If you ask any average joe on the street to name a black football, baseball, or basketball player they’d have no problem. But hockey? Only about 50 active NHL players are of black, Asian, Latino, Arab/Middle Eastern, or Native American/First Nation (including 2017 first round draft picks). Willie O’Ree was the first black player to be called up the NHL by the Boston Bruins in 1958 – eleven years after Jackie Robison made headlines as the first African American MLB player. It wasn’t until 1982 that Val Jones became the first African American player in the NHL. Grant Fuhr was the first black player to win the Stanley Cup in 1984 with the Edmonton Oilers. He was also the first black player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2003. The Hockey Hall of Fame was established in 1943 and it took sixty years for a black player to be inducted.
The league is taking steps to try to promote diversity with programs like Hockey is for Everyone but it isn’t enough. It is our responsibility as hockey fans to make the sport welcoming and safe for everyone. It doesn’t start with the league, it starts with us. It starts by saying that what is happening in Virginia and in other communities across North America is not okay and we will not accept it.
Hockey can and will be a sport where players and fans of any race, religion, gender, or orientation can feel safe and accepted and have fun. It can be because we will make it so. Hockey is not just for rich white boys. Love the sport. Grow the game. Know your history. Take no bullshit from anyone. Be part of the solution.
i’m so tired of movies whose only real premise is “the best dude in the world at this non-white thing… is a white dude.” like The Last Samurai, where Tom Cruise is for some reason the only one who can properly understand samurai culture. i want the opposite of that. i want a movie where the best person in the world at this extremely white thing is a non-white person. Like imagine Aziz Ansari has to enter a bagpiping contest to save the honor of some teeny Scottish town and ends up marrying the stoic, humorless Scottish babe who is inexplicably good with swords. Or the fate of the American nation somehow depends on Li Bingbing learning how to play bluegrass. Or idk Canada’s hockey team has lost its coach and is going to suck and only the magic of Lupita Nyong’o can save them. Or maybe there’s a sports team from a country that doesn’t traditionally do the sport and oh I’m thinking of Cool Runnings. Let’s all rewatch Cool Runnings
to all the people that complain about black people in historical european settings: don’t you ever get tired of being racist?
“but it’s not historically accurate”, i see you cry out. you know what else isn’t historically accurate? all the perfect teeth. all the hairless women. the costumes, often. the accents. the fact that i’m supposed to believe that everyone spoke english all the time regardless of where they were and which company was present. but sure, black people in medieval europe, that’s the big historical innacuracy. because you’re racist.
The only thing Kylo is coded as is a villain. Privileged white boy who uses force against others to get what he thinks he’s owned. You want a character that was actually abused and shows signs of being mentally ill? Finn. You want a q-coded character? Poe. Stop projecting into the fascist white dude because you don’t want to relate to two characters of color.
Let’s start with Chirrut, played by Donnie Yen. When Chirrut first showed up in the movie, I had a sense of dread: “ah, here we go with the magical Asian stereotype.” After all, he was wearing robes, carried a staff, and offered some vague, mysterious platitudes about the kyber crystal necklace Jyn was wearing. He knew martial arts, and it looked like that was going to be his defining characteristic. But the more interactions we saw between Chirrut and the other characters, the more revolutionary he seemed as a character — while the TV Tropes page may technically list Chirrut as a “Magical Asian” (your mileage may vary, obviously), in many ways, he turned the stereotype on its head. After all, here was an Asian male character who was also Force-sensitive, religious, a badass, and disabled. He was wise, sure, but he was also impish and wry.
In a lesser movie, he’d have been the Mr. Miyagi or Pai-Mei of Rogue One, whose sole purpose was to offer bland mystic platitudes while teaching the white protagonist. But Chirrut didn’t just speak in platitudes or proverbs, even though his most memorable line is a prayer chant. He made jokes and cracked wise, most memorably when he asked “are you kidding me?” as Saw Gerrera’s rebels placed a black bag over his head. He also didn’t offer to teach any of the other characters (and what good would that have done, really, in the timeframe this movie takes place in?), and Jyn, the sole white protagonist, didn’t exceed his particular skills by virtue of being white and “special.”
“In the first episode, Danny breaks into unsubtitled Mandarin upon
learning [Jessica Henwick’s character] is a martial artist, apparently assuming Asian women he
casually meets on the street are happy to speak Mandarin with a white
stranger.“
Steel Phoenix Studios 