OPRF: Updated
“Jake, you hyped for today's game?”
“Actually, no, we are all getting mic’d up for the entire game”
Mic’d up? Our football team? “A few years ago there was a claim made that some racial slurs were used on the field here or something, now they are making a documentary.” Bemused, I slowly consumed each bite of the information I heard. The first taste was sour, a little bit of anger taste; this wouldn’t happen at our school? But that quickly became an aftertaste in a nanosecond. The news mellowed and I processed it with all of my educational abilities, applying my context clues and my prior knowledge. Homogenous, white, wealthy, affluent, high-achieving, Hinsdale Central. It was bound to happen, bound to have conflict. That little snippet of information spread like wildfire across the following days.
I needed context, I needed to understand what was going on. Tracking down STARZ on Xfinity and quickly fast forwarding to the final segment of episode three of a show titled, America is Me, about OPRF high school. The teacher begins a round circle discussion with a group of students. “Talk about a time where you witnessed or experienced racism.” Eventually, the prompt works its way around to a young black student. “I thought of a football game against Hinsdale,” he began, “We [were] at their place, which is a place I hate being. I’m running and I get tacked and then this guy says some, some, that I don’t think I’m allowed to repeat.” The teacher reassures him that it’s okay. “He calls me a bitch ass nigger and that I should get back on the bus and go back to where I came from.” The entire time that segment climaxed, I was just hoping and praying that whatever the Hinsdale student says wasn’t all that bad, or at least no enough to make a documentary - but I was proven very horribly wrong.
Tuesday crept up stealthily as it does. A fire alarm of a wake-up sound jacked and jumped as the blurry, white letters read 6:05. It took me another nanosecond to process where I was, what day it was, and that it was a Citizens Club day. Stumbling around in the dark, I reached for my phone. The instant bang of light sprang all my senses into rapid, dramatic action.
Text from Emmett Drew: ‘I spoke to the department chair, we aren’t going to be able to talk about OPRF today.” Another nanosecond of shock, and then the mellow of reality. Hinsdale Central, high-achieving, demanding parents, loud community. Perfection.
The happenings of that Friday night football game - so dramatic and drastic as they were - our mere club of overachieving nerds who wake up early to talk about politics, was being censored. Censored from talking about an incident of our history. Censored. The irony came as our group had to settle to talk about Chinese censorship for the morning, instead. What the student was yelled by a Hinsdale Central player was disgusting and abhorrent, and quite frankly, makes me less proud to call myself a Red Devil than I already was. But the surfacing of this incident will just fuel the stereotypes that other schools have of us. You heard the young man, HC is “a place I hate being [at].” And the fact that we don’t even to get to discuss what happened is just as abhorrent. “ Hinsdale...William Walsh said the school staff regularly talks to students about good sportsmanship, good character and respecting diversity. But given the timing of the episode,...extra attention was given to those topics, Walsh said” (Chicago Tribune 09/07/18). That doesn’t seem like extra attention to me. A constant process at Hinsdale Central, with a nanosecond of shock, followed by a mellow of reality. I should be far from shocked.