Remember the Alamo (Heights)
How an inflammatory chant at a high school game is deeper than basketball.
SAN ANTONIO, TX -- The
Texas Region IV-4A high school boys basketball championships that
pitted San Antonio Edison High School against Alamo Heights High School
ended with a handshake and a celebration. It also ended with a racial
and nationalist taunt from several fans from Alamo Heights, who chanted
"USA, USA, USA" to celebrate its primarily white team and the school's
victory over the mostly Latino squad. While the Alamo coaches tried to
quiet the crowd, the damage was done.
"Our kids try real hard and work extra
hard to get to the regional tournament, and then we have to worry about
them being subjected to this kind of insensitivity," noted Edison coach
Gil Garza. "To be attacked about your ethnicity and being made to feel
that you don't belong in this country is terrible. Why can't people just
applaud our kids? It just gets old and I'm sick of it. Once again,
we're on pins and needles wondering what's going to happen."
This
incident was not the first anti-immigrant outburst on the floor in San
Antonio. In 2011, Cedar Park High School, a predominantly white school
with an equally white basketball squad, battled Lanier, a high school
with an all-Latino squad. During the course of the game, Cedar Park fans
chanted a myriad of anti-Latino chants, including "USA, USA." They also
cheered "Arizona, Arizona," a clear reference to SB 1070, legislation
that institutionalized anti-Latino racism. And, fans yelled "this is not
soccer, this is not soccer" clearly linking their teams success (and
ultimate victory) to their whiteness over and against a group of
foreigners, marked as such because of their project affinity for and
ability at an un-American game. Stereotypes about Latino and soccer
reduced the basketball court to nothing more than a competition for
racial superiority, another opportunity to police the border through the
assertion of white nationalism.
The
chant represents a brief, local reiteration of the long-standing
equation where USA equals White within the national imagination. It
reflects and is a consequence of the vitriol and the anti-immigrant
sentiment that dominated the national landscape in recent years. The
chant should not be surprise in a moment when presidential candidates
"joke" about immigrant deaths or wish they would just deport themselves,
when state legislatures make culture and skin color probable cause, and
when public officials declare ethnic studies illegal. The chant
reflects the same sentiments as those articulated by Rush Limbaugh, who
has described America's immigration in the following way: "[S]ome people
would say we're already under attack by aliens-not space aliens, but
illegal aliens." It is an outgrowth of a historic sentiment that
imagines Latinos irrespective of citizenship as foreigners and
undesirable. It reflects an increasingly ferocious anti-Latino sentiment
that both represents and treat Latinos as "illegal aliens" neither
welcome nor deserving of the legal protections of the United States. It
should come us no surprise given this larger history and the ramped up
anti-immigrant sentiment in recent years. It embodies as Tanya Golash
Boza, assistant professor of sociology at University of Kansas, told one
of us: "In the white American mindset, the only group that gets an
unhyphenated American identity is white." It should come us no surprise
given this larger history and the ramped up anti-immigrant sentiment in
recent years.
According
to Alexandro José Gradilla, an Associate Professor in the Department of
Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Fullerton, the chant embodies
"a new political climate of 'papers please'" where all Latinos are
presumed to be outsiders, threats to the national success of the United
States. The racial hostility and the nationalist celebration at these
high school basketball games, notes Gradilla, "signal a new racializing
paradigm of conflating Mexican Americans with Mexican Immigrants-hence
the chants of USA USA were appropriate to use against these possibly
'illegal' and 'alien' people." Given the history of sports, so often a
place to authenticate national superiority, play out racial tensions,
and exhibit masculine prowess, the efforts to nationalize the
basketball, to use the victory as evidence of national/racial
superiority, is reflective of the political orientation of sports.
The
staging of anti-immigrant sentiments at a basketball game and the ease
with which chanting for a predominantly White team slides into rooting
for America is not surprising. The outrage and the ultimate apology from
the school district ("Unfortunately, after the game, we had a handful
of students who made a bad decision and we're very sorry it happened.
They made a mistake and we're going to use this as a learning
experience...") has prompted conservative commentators to argue
political correctness run amuck and to otherwise deny any racial animus.
According to The Blaze: "Joe 'Pags' Pagliarulo-a nationally syndicated
radio host based in San Antonio and frequent fill-in for Glenn Beck-on
Wednesday blasted the local media coverage of the controversy, saying
reporters demonized the 'U-S-A!' chant, rather than presenting the story
as students misusing it as a taunt." Similarly, Fox's Eric Bolling
defended the players and questioned any need to apologize: "The
political correctness of what they are doing... They are apologizing for
chanting USA, within the USA, playing another team from the USA, who
likely has legal American citizens on their basketball team!"
Equally
predictable has been the apology that essentially said this is not who
we are: we are not racist. Others have gone as far as to accuse students
Edison of chanting "Alamo-all white," almost force the students from
Alamo to respond unkindly. Absent from the initial reports and without
video corroboration, this suggestion reads as a post facto allegation
meant to get the Alamo Heights people off the hook-"they are racist too
and perhaps were racist before we were racist."
At
the same time, others have identified this situation as a teachable
moment. The efforts to deny any malice, to label as a joke, to deflect,
deny and minimize represents a dual move. At one level, the deployment
of the race denial card and the focus on jokes endeavor to exculpate
individual students as well as the school. At the same time, depicting
the chant as an aberration ("kids made a bad decision"), as
out-of-character for the students, school, and country, the chant
becomes an instance where education and discipline has the potential to
right any wrongs. It can be corrected, thereby erasing the structural
inequalities evident in anti-immigrant legislation and the larger
history that both scapegoats Latinos and imagines people of color as
never true citizens.
Words
matter. The chant uttered at this high school game isn't just a phrase
but one saturated with meaning, history, and violence. In his brilliant
piece on language, H. Sammy Alim reminds readers about the consequences
of words and language. Writing about efforts to rid public discourse of
the term "illegal," Alim, a professor at Stanford University, argues:
Pejorative,
discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case,
activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term
"illegals" and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As
difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute
for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.'s annual Hate Crime
Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of
ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly
described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent
action.
When
Latinos are continually labeled as foreigners, as "aliens," as
un-American and as otherwise not part of the national fabric, it is no
wonder that Latinos are subjected to both racist taunts on the
basketball court and "papers please" profiling throughout the country.
David
J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical
Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University,
Pullman. He is the author of "Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary
African American Cinema" and the forthcoming "After Artest: Race and the
War on Hoop" (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to
NewBlackMan and blogger at No Tsuris.
C.
Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington
State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books,
including "Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy" and
"Postcolonial America."
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