By: Hailey Lindblom<\/p>\n
On Monday, October 26th in the OPRF room guest speaker Andrew Maraniss came to\u00a0talk to the students and faculty members of CUC about race in college sports.\u00a0Maraniss was a\u00a0Journalism major at Vanderbilt; during his time there he learned\u00a0about race in one of his classes. He then had the brilliant idea to write about race in sports\u00a0at his school. The primary subject for his paper was his classmate, Perry Wallace.<\/p>\n
Wallace was an all-star athlete who had scholarships to multiple\u00a0schools. His main sport was basketball, but he also played football. Wallace was of\u00a0African-American descent, and throughout his life he had to deal with racism.\u00a0When he was looking at colleges, many were just starting to open their doors for the\u00a0people of color which\u00a0saw a lot of backlash from the Caucasian community.<\/p>\n
Wallace\u2019s family and community members were not happy with his decision to go to\u00a0Vanderbilt, but he was adamant on attending because he felt it was the right thing to do\u00a0and he wanted to make a difference.\u00a0The coaches were very pleased with his decision to attend their school, but they\u00a0had a lot of parents and faculty members on their backs explaining how they could not\u00a0understand why they let him attend this school in the first place.<\/p>\n
Wallace was mistreated during his four years in college. He explained that he was\u00a0treated in three different ways, which were: well, poorly, and not at all. To better explain\u00a0this, Maraniss said that when Wallace was treated well, that meant that he was being left\u00a0alone and no one would bother him. His example was when Wallace attended a\u00a0predominately white church; the members of the church (which was on campus) would\u00a0leave him sit in the back all alone. As for poor treatment, when Wallace returned to the church\u00a0the members became angry and started to threaten the pastor if he did not stop attending, that\u00a0they would be taking their money and start going to a new church. Lastly, for not at all,\u00a0one day the pastor approached Wallace and told him that he was no longer able to\u00a0attended the church and he could not return.<\/p>\n
As Maraniss explained more of Wallace\u2019s story, the audience\u2019s reactions were\u00a0unbelievable. Ranging from sad to disgust; the spectators were at a loss.\u00a0After Maraniss finished, a few of the spectators sat down to discuss how they felt.<\/p>\n
Senior Marisia Robinson-Banister had this to say:\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t believe everything that he had to go through just to play the sport he\u00a0loves. As I was listening, I couldn\u2019t help to think what if I was him? Could I or would I\u00a0still be playing the sport I love?\u201d<\/p>\n
Many were also asking questions at the end, but the most interesting question that was\u00a0brought up was the one about racism today and what Wallace thought about the\u00a0movements such as: Black Lives Matter<\/em>.<\/p>\n Maraniss answered by saying, “Wallace is happy with the movements he is upset that it\u00a0has taken this long for people to start making a difference.”<\/p>\n Overall, the viewers were pleased with the speaker and they left with a new idea in their\u00a0heads about racism and the privileges that they have.<\/p>\n To hear more about Wallace\u2019s story, you can purchase the book Strong Inside: Perry\u00a0Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, written by Maraniss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Hailey Lindblom On Monday, October 26th in the OPRF room guest speaker Andrew Maraniss came to\u00a0talk to the students and faculty members of CUC about race in college sports.\u00a0Maraniss was a\u00a0Journalism major at Vanderbilt; during his time there he learned\u00a0about race in one of his classes. He then had the brilliant idea to write […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-1696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concordia-news","tag-andrew-maraniss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}