Writing The Self 2: The Team That Stood Out

A man lightly taps my coach on the shoulder: “hey, did you guys notice you are the only full white team here?” The loud echoing sounds of multiple basketballs dribbling across the floor did not help as we sat there perplexed with our thoughts running all over the place. How do you respond to that? Are other people looking at our team and thinking the same thing, shaming us for having no diversity? Everything just seemed so overwhelming. We began looking around the loud, packed gymnasium at the other teams to see if this comment was true. Teams everywhere, some chatting amongst themselves, others stretching and getting warmed up. Sure enough, every single team had a variety of people with different skin colours while ours had no such differences. Does this make us stand out? Are we not representing our school and community well? All of these concerns and emotions made us feel humiliated. The intense buzzer rang, making my body jolt – the first quarter was underway for two other teams. 

By now I was not even paying attention to the game that was going on. This was the first time someone ever pointed out the fact that our team consisted only of white females. Until now, we never looked at our team as being different than everyone else’s. The thought that others could be thinking those same thoughts as they look at our team never once crossed our minds. Does the presence of our team radiate white power, privilegde, and rights in other peoples eyes? 

Our team was oblivious to the fact that we were all white. Our school has to be 99% if not more populated with white students. There was not even one student of a different race to even try out for the high school basketball team, so it might look bad that there was no diversity but there was no way around it. We have always been surrounded by white people that sometimes it is easy to forget, ignore, and not think about other races and the challenges they may face as we are not reminded about it through our daily lives. All of the white privileges we hold are hidden to us because it is just “our normal” in the environment we are in. 

We wanted to oppose that comment and provide some justification, but where is that going to get us? It is like we are in denial, but really the statement was true – we were in fact the only complete white team there. We did not want our team to come across as racist or biased, but how could we help what others think of us? It is like we were never aware how different our lives and environment was until someone called us out about it. “Bzzzz,” the first quarter just ended, time to get ready for our game now.