The Good, The Bad, The Furtable: White People Do Stupid Things ... Again
Welcome friends to the madness that is women’s soccer. Each week we will take a look around and see what is good, what is in fact bad and the what is what the furt in this landscape we all help care for.
The Good
This is going to be a little self serving this week. Forgive me, fair reader.
On August 4, Backline Soccer turned four years old. And honestly I never in a million years thought we would get there. The idea for the site, my desire to cover the NWSL, was pretty bright burning when this project started in 2016. Over the years my passion for women’s soccer has only grown. Running a site is a bigger challenge than I ever dreamed but also something I will always be grateful I am allowed to do.
Independent sites are critical to the NWSL and women’s soccer in general. Thank you all for allowing us to be part of the women’s soccer community.
The Bad
Oh Utah Royals, you always have to make me shake my head, don’t you?
The Utah Royals teamed up with Wasatch Front Ford Dealers for a promotion which includes cops getting rebates. Which, in the current environment, is a yikes the size of a small country.
I wrote about this more for RSL so instead of repeating myself I will link you there.
But there is a part of it I want to directly restate here:
“One of the most important things that the Black Lives Matter movement should teach white people is that our experiences aren’t universal. Our comfort or not, our respect or not, or our protection or not with police can not seamlessly translate from us to others. The white experience has been holding up as the default in this country for a very long time, since before there was a country to speak of. It’s time that white people stop for a moment and unpack why we lump police in with firefighters or paramedics, and why we assume seeing someone in uniform is a universally comforting experience when those same uniforms have brought so much pain to some.”
The Furt
Oh white people. We really, really need to stop trying to think the problem with racism is that people don’t love each other enough or that if we just all would meet each other things would get better.
Julie and Zach Ertz have a foundation that just put on a summer camp. And no, having a summer camp in the middle of a pandemic isn’t the issue.
What would make any adult in the year 2020 think that bringing local cops to the camp to meet kids, a sizable number of whom are Black, is a good idea. I can only assume that the adults in this room think the problem is that cops and kids never meet.
It was weird. I do not understand why in this climate the Ertzes would think this was a good idea from an optics point of view or just like a point of view from a place of common sense. The problem isn’t Black people don’t know cops, but that the institutions are deeply racist. A photo op and a kid smiling at a cop, be that cop white or Black, isn’t going to change that.