Amherst professor Robert Hayashi teaches on race and sports. What he says sports fans need to learn now.
Hayashi has taught at Amherst since 2008.
During his course titled “Sports of America,” Amherst College professor Robert Hayashi stands in front of the class and explains the racial history of mascots within professional sports. In one lesson, he projects an image of the Washington Redskins logo and challenges his class to dig deeper to figure out what irks them — if it irks them at all — about what they see projected on the smart board before them.
It’s an exercise in critical thinking, and a challenge to the status quo of traditions we’ve known our whole lives. Having worked at Amherst since 2008, Hayashi has taught courses in Asian American studies, ethnic literature, research methods, and sports history, all within a town that was founded by Jeffery Amherst, a military man with an agenda against indigenous people. Hayashi also played an active role on the committee that worked to change the school’s unofficial mascot, Lord Jeff, to the Mammoths in 2017.
The conversations Hayashi holds with his students are as relevant as they’ve ever been. (Editor’s note: The author took a class with Hayashi in 2018). Hayashi educates his students on the experiences and athletic pursuits of slaves in the 185os in readings such as “The Play of Slave Children in the Plantation Communities of the Old South” by David Wiggins. He reveals how systematic racism has continued to effect people of color in, “Representing the Ghetto Playground: From ‘Be Like Mike’ to Hoop Dreams” by Jeffrey Chown. In weekly discussions, the class engages in conversations about power dynamics, race, gender inequality, class, and even their own institution at Amherst.
With discussions around racial justice happening in all parts of society, including sports, Boston.com called Hayashi to discuss history, race, politics, and the discourse of American society through sports.
BDC: How are you doing? How is everything going?
Hayashi: I’m fine. You know, like everybody else, this whole thing has turned life upside down. But my wife and I just count our blessings every day. But, you know, the inflaming of racist sentiment is very disturbing. And for someone who is Asian, this virus thing is a little distressing.
I just made the decision yesterday to teach remotely because I don’t want to go on campus right now for assurances. It’s a real drag, but I mean, the way things are going around the country, I have no sense of what’s going to happen when we bring people to campus. What happens when all these people come back and they test positive?
BDC: How have you been processing everything, whether it’s the coronavirus or even what’s going on now with the Black Lives Matter movement?
Hayashi: As much as I was dying for the NHL postseason and it sort of gets me through the end of the spring semester, it certainly underlines the significance of sports in contrast to things such as politics. Like a lot of non-whites, I am at once both really excited and hopeful to see this widespread social movement addressing institutionalized racism, but I am also deeply concerned about what I see as a performative ally-ship at institutions across the country, even in academia.
I know people like myself are not willing to sort of sit back and give my institution the benefit of the doubt. Like Amherst [and] other institutions, you know, we have our problems. And I think it can’t be just obviously people of color to really show up because you could imagine what would happen if, let’s say, Drew Brees took a knee. If Tom Brady actually did see race. What would happen if it’s people like that really took responsibility for this?
I want to give Drew Brees the benefit of the doubt that he really didn’t know these things. But, you know, to consider what it means that he didn’t know these things and felt so comfortable and so forceful in his protestations that this was appropriate? I think that speaks to the kind of privilege and who gets voice. That white players still are the face of the NFL.
BDC: Right, and whether it’s sports commissioners, institutions, or even people that you follow on Instagram and Facebook, it feels like all of a sudden, everyone wants to get educated and apologize. From your perspective and through a historical context, what has it been like to see that performative ally-ship?
Hayashi: I talked to one of my best friends and I joked to him, just like ‘Where have they been all my life?’
I was kind of direct with a colleague who was asking for materials and I just sort of felt like, ‘Why is that on us give materials to educate you?’ You know, if you’re non-white, you grew up in the world of having to adjust to whites’ perspective of you, how things you say are going to impact them, how you respond could make them uncomfortable. So I think it’s tied to those of the majority to put themselves in that position: there are things I don’t know, I need to go find out those sources, I need to educate myself and be aware of the ways in which I get to enjoy certain privileges and opportunities, just as a matter of course. And to then think, who doesn’t?
I really think at this point, the thing that excites me and makes me hopeful is that your generation is a generation that is more tolerant, open-minded, and less accepting of the status quo. But, what does concern me is that lack of historical understanding of these issues.
So it’s not that you just do something because it feels like the right thing to do. But understand the historical legacy of particularly racism in the Unites States. That should require all of us to be aware of that and dismantle that. And that it’s institutionalized.
BDC: That idea immediately brought me back to your class, like when we learned about mascots and the racial historical context and what they really mean. What is it like for you to educate students on the history of sports, and yet at the same time know that the average sports fan might not even know this history, or care?
Hayashi: I very intentionally taught that issue because at Amherst we had our issue with the Lord Jeff [mascot]. I was on the committee, which led successfully to a changing of the mascot, which has been embraced.
I think one of the things is to educate people about the historical roots of an individual mascot: What was its evolution? What is the significance? And to understand them from different people’s perspectives. So how you can say, as the Redskins do, you’re honoring native people when you’re completely disregarding their current opinions about that mascot? And, understanding the history of native peoples, of the dispossession of native lands, native rights, the genocide that did occur on native peoples, the ongoing challenges faced by the native community as a result of that history.
The [mascot] in Walpole, I mean, creating a mascot called the ‘Rebels’ in Massachusetts in 1968. I would love to know what the conversation was about that, but it certainly seems historically to be really a provocative gesture in 1968 in Massachusetts to create a mascot that embraces the Confederacy at that time period seems perhaps intentionally divisive.
But, teaching that [course] was useful and sometimes it is really surprising or uncomfortable to hear people’s views about it because they’re really passionate. It’s all emotion, it’s affect.
A copy of Hayashi’s “Sports of America” class syllabus from 2018.
BDC: Sports definitely can evoke an emotional reaction from people, especially involving political and social issues. For instance, Colin Kaepernick and the notion of kneeling at an NFL football game. From your perspective as well, what are your thoughts on how people react so vividly when it comes to sports being disrupted?
Hayashi: I think that people have this notion that they want sports to be like their drug: I want to escape everything, so entertain me. And then, what that says to the athletes and what you hear many of them saying is, ‘I’m a human being.’ I am not here to just entertain you. I am a person who comes to this space with history, with experiences and personal perspectives. You telling me I can’t articulate that is telling me I can’t be a person. I can’t be a man [or] a woman. I also just find it somewhat perversely amusing that people say keep the politics out of sports.
How a stadium gets built, how the league gets created and who gets to end up playing on a team and who gets opportunities as a kid is very much involved with politics. So to say, take those out, what you’re saying is, ‘I don’t want to hear any political discourse that makes me uncomfortable.’ In certain spaces, that’s really historically troubling when you look at the long history of treating people of color, particularly African-Americans, as sources of entertainment to the American public while denying their humanity.
I’m old enough to remember like the literal debates about, ‘Can an African-American play quarterback?’ And now look at Patrick Mahomes. Look who the stars are now right right in the league.
BDC: There is also the notion of players feeling as though they are representing a team, and therefore might not feel comfortable to speak out, or have not felt “encouraged” to do so. What is your take on the position that Black athletes could feel they are in?
Hayashi: Well, it is an entertainment industry, right? I mean, if you’ve played on sports teams, there is a way which you’re sort of conditioned to absolve yourself of your personal goals and your personal perspective. And I think it can be easy also to sort of lose yourself on the right, as it can be for anybody in a in a workspace. Like, this is who we are and we’re team whatever and so much of that discourse infiltrates American workspaces.
So, to step outside of that is to do something that’s [considered] not a good teammate. You’re rocking the boat, you’re making us all uncomfortable. In a society where, you know, relations between workers and their laborers is, you know, a very kind rigid hierarchy where the power resides at the top and the benefits flow to the top, labor activism almost seems to some people like a like an antiquated, impolite disruption or something.
BDC: Right, and it’s also about people being aware of those power dynamics. I’m curious, what part of history do you think that people need to get re-educated on the most?
Hayashi: It’s so funny because I’ve had these conversations lately with my my daughter. She was so angry because she felt like she couldn’t have a way to understand what was happening right now because she said they taught us about Martin Luther King and the civil rights era, but nothing after that.
I think part of that is really having very critical perspectives upon the teaching of history that are multiethnic, multiracial. That informs students that Martin Luther King did not solve our racial problems, and it wasn’t just about race. His platform was much more wide-sweeping, much more dangerous, and particularly later on his life. There were plenty that were not on board with that wide-sweeping critique, including progressive whites.
People have such a surface understanding of these issues and I think that’s that’s really troubling right now. When I see people, like even white friends of mine, performing this sort of wokeness…I see it even with many of our students, like they’re really engaged and they’re progressive minded, but they don’t have the historical understanding to really fully grasp the reality of this moment and what’s at stake.
BDC: With that, what has it been like for you personally to teach about history, race and sports in a state like Massachusetts and in a town like Amherst?
Hayashi: You know, we’re being asked to come up with new courses and stuff, so I’m transforming a course from years ago, which I’ll be looking at discrete historical moments and how they’ve been remembered through different mediums: some of the challenges to recalling difficult moments in history, the trauma involved, the appropriate way to think about these and the differences between individual memories, collective memories, national memories. Even these debates we’re in right now, which are about monuments. What troubles me about that is that people don’t have that understanding of what those things signify or what they mean in a moment.
Part of the challenge is doing it in a very self-identifying progressive institution that means at times there’s a lack of self-inquiry and that kind of ethos that can filter throughout the community. I’m in a department that has a lot of very like-minded progressive people and we teach race and ethnicity from a comparative framework. It’s a really generative space to be in a place like that with like-minded colleagues.
This is a moment to really address racism across the board and other vestiges of imperialism that impact our communities. Some of my students will go on and they will be influencers, they will be in the media, politics, they will be physicians with patients. They will maybe think about some of these things and for me, that’s really rewarding.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com