{"id":54994,"date":"2017-09-29T02:35:50","date_gmt":"2017-09-29T02:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54994"},"modified":"2017-09-29T02:58:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T02:58:09","slug":"the-problem-with-football-is-not-colin-kaepernick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54994","title":{"rendered":"The Problem With Football Is Not Colin Kaepernick"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Problem With Football Is Not Colin Kaepernick<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Shondaland<\/a>
\n2017-09-28<\/p>\n

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nGetty<\/small><\/p>\n

I was the only girl on my high school’s football team \u2014 but I can no longer support the sport.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was the only girl on my high school\u2019s tackle football team.<\/p>\n

I grew up watching my father clap his hands loudly, and yell at the TV during NFL<\/a> games. I remember sometimes falling asleep to that sweet sound. He knew very little about football when he immigrated to the U.S.<\/a> from Jamaica<\/a> in the 1950s for college. He and his roomates were some of the only black people on campus, and they were also on the university\u2019s football team. This is how my dad both learned the joys of black American culture, and developed his deep love of American football<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Eventually he ended up in Washington, D.C.<\/a>, where I was born. My white mom got full custody of my brother and me after our parents\u2019 divorce when we were still young, so I grew up desperate to find ways to connect with my dad. I would try to speak Patois <\/a>\u2014 though he had lost his accent since college to avoid being constantly \u201cotherized.\u201d I would try and learn factoids about the countries he visited in eastern Africa<\/a> while searching for his roots and for a place with no racial or class oppression. But the single biggest gesture I made to try and gain my father\u2019s love \u2014 was to learn to love football…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was the only girl on my high school’s football team \u2014 but I can no longer support the sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,20],"tags":[24878,118,12646,8952,26777,18329,27547,7222],"class_list":["post-54994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-colin-kaepernick","tag-fanshen-cox","tag-fanshen-cox-digiovanni","tag-football","tag-national-football-league","tag-nfl","tag-shondaland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54994"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55000,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54994\/revisions\/55000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}