Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 12 No. 6 | June 2020

10 Inside Hokie Sports Privilege. That word and what it represents have been on the top of my mind over the past few weeks. I never really had thought much about it. You grow up where you grow up. You’re born into the family that you are. You play the hand that you’re dealt, and that becomes your life. I, for instance, was born white to two loving parents and experienced a typical suburban upbringing in a pair of equally Caucasian-dominant cities in the Midwest. I didn’t know anything different. We weren’t, by any means, the richest family, and I certainly owned my share of jealousies—not having as many designer jeans as my friends, not living at the lake, and not getting the girl I loved in high school. All fairly common feelings of inadequacy experienced in a middle-class upbringing, I guess. However, I never worried about my next meal or the roof over my head. I worried about the police some, too, but only because my friends and I occasionally made some poor choices. I worried about them busting one of our high school parties and passing out underage drinking citations. I worried about being caught smoking cigarettes. I worried about my parents finding out. I never worried about the police physically hurting me. And I never worried about being singled out for what I looked like. Of course, I looked like them, and everybody else around me for that matter. My family endured some hardship because of addiction, and for much of my life, I came to believe that somehow made my life harder than others. In reality, it made me more empathetic and understanding. For a long time, I believed that was enough. It certainly allowed me to make a lot of friends and relate to any number of people. But at the time I graduated high school, I had not experienced diversity of any kind. Four black students attended my high school of more than 2,000 people. I had one mixed-race friend. I remember him telling me when we got older that, as a kid, he used to try to take soap and scrub his skin to make it lighter because he wanted to look like the rest of us. I empathized with him at the time, but I didn’t truly absorb what he said. I lacked an ability to process how that felt. The only recollection of race I can recall occurred when I was 13 years old. Three of my friends and I entered a 3-on-3 basketball tournament that served as a part of the NBA’s All-Star Weekend held in Minneapolis. We were pretty good, and we breezed through the tournament competing against all-white competition. In the championship game, we found ourselves matched up with a team comprised of all black players. We lost. We lost because we played scared, or at least I was. That seemed odd because we attended the NBA All-Star Game the next day, and I cheered my heroes at the time—all black. At 13, I thought little of the hypocrisy. Instead, I thought a lot about not wanting to live my life in a small bubble. Most people do that from my hometown. They go to college, get married to someone relatively local, and settle close to where they grew up. There was certainly nothing wrong with that, but I wanted something more, something different. I wasn’t necessarily seeking diversity in people when I set out, but I definitely sought out diversity in experiences. I found both through sports. When I worked as an intern at KFAN radio in Minneapolis, I collected post-game audio from the locker room—my primary responsibility. I had my go-to guys who always gave me a soundbite or two. They included Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones from the Twins, Koren Robinson and Byron Chamberlain from the Vikings, and Latrell Sprewell from the Timberwolves. Robinson and Sprewell had bad reputations, yet I found them to be two of the kinder men I ever encountered. They all seemingly went out of their way to help me because I was young, green and clearly had no idea what I was doing. They were all black men. Again, I never thought much of it at the time. In minor league baseball, I met people from all walks of life. The clubhouse served as a melting pot of white players, black players and many players from Latin America. We bussed together, we roomed together, and they took the field together. However, away from the ballpark, people tended to migrate toward others like them. I noticed, but just wrote it off as a common occurrence. When I left minor league baseball to come to Virginia Tech, I was 35 years old and no longer the naïve 18-year-old high school graduate who lacked experiences with anyone different than myself. I had friends of every ethnic background, and I thought that to be enough. I wasn’t racist, and because of that, I never really concerned myself with race. I knew that I was cool with everybody and felt that my experiences around so many different races in some ways made me understand. When I went home to Minnesota, I marveled at the lack of diversity and how different it seemed than the world I knew. I oftentimes felt a worldly superiority to those who hadn’t left. Southwest Virginia stands also as an area largely populated by white people—with the exception of Virginia Tech, and in particular, its athletics teams. By the time I got to Blacksburg, I took pride in my past experiences and relationships and felt comfortable working with the football and men’s basketball programs. In fact, I largely ignored that most of the players whom I interacted with and interviewed were black. That was normal. with Jon Laaser A Time to Change Providing Teamwork and Fast Forward Document Technology to Virginia Tech Athletics ... and your company! MFPs I Document Management I Managed Print Services I Production Print VBS VT ad 2018_Layout 1 7/26/18 10:28 AM Page 1