Black community leaders in Danville are accusing the basketball coach at the Danville High School of racial profiling, after the coach cut eight black basketball players from his team. The kicker to this story is that Danville High School basketball has an all-black team:

Now they’re planning to organize a protest in an attempt to get Coach Gary Tidwell, who is white, removed.

“We need to play hard ball to get some answers,” said Frank McCullough, pastor of Mount Olive Christian Church.

School officials are standing behind their white devil, saying he was doing what’s best for the team. Two ministers at one of the local churches said that isn’t good enough, they are demanding answers. Although answers were given to them, they didn’t like those answers and are demanding new answers, answers that suit them better:

They said the parents questioned Tidwell about his selection process, but weren’t satisfied with his answers.

Tidwell “said there were five factors he looked at – whether they were coachable, academics, commitment level, behavior and athletic skill,” Wilson said. “We found a flaw in that … None of these boys had a problem with that. But let’s just say it was their skill level. You had all summer long to work with them. There were open gyms, but they weren’t invited.”

The kids weren’t good enough? Wrong answer, coach.

Not being good enough is not the answer the *church leaders* were looking for, so they resorted back to the only card in the deck that is necessary to cower their opposition. Can you guess what card that might be?

“We have racial profiling going on,” McCullough said, adding that’s the only explanation in his mind. “He took a look at the way the young men wore their hair, and made comments about that and whether he thought they should be hanging out with certain people.”

Before the meeting, Kelly said he felt Tidwell discriminated against him and senior Ayron Worthington, who wasn’t at the meeting, because they wore braids. But he acknowledged that two other players who were not cut also wear them.

It’s cornrow discrimination. Maybe their cornrows were too long, maybe they were tattered, perhaps they were too corny. It’s obvious the coach is a follicle bigot.

Backing up the *church leaders* are the parents of the discriminated upon youths. Here’s how one of the parents sees it:

Debra Gouard, a local minister and Bryant’s mother, was incensed when Tidwell told her and other mothers that he chose the best players for the team, but that he didn’t have his selection criteria in writing.

Because having the criteria in writing would have easily satisfied this understanding and reasonable group of folks. 

Seeing as though the coach and school administrators were not going to fold, the *church leaders* decided that enough is enough, it’s time to ratchet things up a bit:

McCullough, who urged the students to convince their classmates to boycott school and adults to miss work so they could picket on Monday. “It’s going to take doing abnormal things to get abnormal results. … They think we’re bluffing. We’ve got to show them and commit to the cause.”

No slam dunk, no peace!

The Mayor is with his African American brothers on this one, he understands their cause. I remember the same thing happened to me when I was playing Junior A hockey as a child. We had these *tryouts* as they were called, where various boys would *try* to make it on to the team. Well, it turned out the coach was into this whole abilityism ideology, and only selected kids he thought were the best. Well this infuriated The Mayor. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I demanded that the shit players be allowed to join. I screamed and yelled and called our coach an abilityist bigot. He folded faster than my dry cleaner on my tailored Gianni Versace dress shirt.

I won a victory that day, yes, I was victorious.

Our team though? Well, we went 0-63 and are still known to this day as *that team that was really good until some fucking idiot destroyed it by demanding crappy players be allowed to join.*

Yes, victory is bittersweet sometimes

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Abilityism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.