On Boston’s Gordon Hayward, education reform and systemic racism

Boston Celtics veteran forward Gordon Hayward caught flak for his ‘education reform’ jersey choice. He shouldn’t have.

Boston Celtics shooting guard Gordon Hayward got a lot of unnecessary flak over the choice he made for his pro- racial justice jersey slogan he selected as part of the NBA’s commitment to providing a platform for racial justice in the disney-hosted restart of the 2019-20 season.

The slogans were one of many interventions agreed on by the National Basketball Player’s Association and the league to restart the season amidst not only a pandemic but the biggest pro-civil rights demonstrations the U.S. had seen in a half-century.

Hayward chose ‘Education Reform’ from the list of approved messages (which generated its own controversy), to the derision and mocking of some.

That is unfortunate, given education reform is one of the most important areas where systemic racism can be uprooted — a fact known well by teammate Jaylen Brown, who has dedicated much of his own activism towards education reform for that reason.

“I think there’s a lot of issues that are going on right now that need [to be] fixed and need change,” explained Hayward when asked about why he chose this issue in particular.

“One thing that I’m passionate about is education I think education is a key and giving I think little kids especially– having little kids of my own — giving little kids the opportunity. It hits home and everybody should have an equal opportunity. Certainly there’s a lot of a lot of places that don’t, and so those places … really need our support.”

“There’s a lot to be done in that area, and my wife and I have been in the education sector in Boston since we’ve gotten here and it’s something that we’ll continue to do,” added the Indiana native.

And Hayward isn’t wrong. Speaking as a sociolinguist, how the horizons of our world appear to us shapes who we believe we can become and aspire to be.

It’s been born out by study after study in the social sciences on issues of race, class, and gender, and has been the impetus of many an intervention to address the lack of minority representation in popular media as much as it has been used to address the lack of representation in history books.

And it isn’t just the cerebral stuff that needs reforming in U.S. education.

As schools have become militarized in an era of increasingly frequent mass shooting events, police have become more tightly woven into the fabric of education, and as a result, negative outcomes plaguing policing elsewhere take shape earlier and more often in the lives of minority students.

This situation, where disobedience and even poor scholarly habits have entangled minors in the criminal justice system sometimes even before junior high school, is called the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’.

Here, education reform can remove the threat of normal pre/adolescent behavior becoming the first foray into having a criminal record and the tendency for such student to become seen as a problem for the criminal justice system instead of their parents and the school board.

An example taken from the personal experience of the author is that of the Dream Defenders, a group I helped organize for while a student at Al Horford’s alma mater, the University of Florida.

The Dream Defenders arose in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, and chose education reform as their focus to help prevent the criminalization of minority youth.

This was planned through advocating for changing policy that creates the so-called ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline.

“We’re not just trying to combat the fact that a lot of students are being arrested,” said Azaari Mason, the Membership and Recruitment chair for the UF Dream Defenders in an article by The Fine Print’s Damian Gonzalez.. “We’re trying to combat the system that allows for a lot of students to be arrested.”

“Alachua is a tiny, tiny county,” offered fellow Dream Defenders organizer Trenton Brooks. “And to be as bad off as we are is obscene.”

Alachua county had a Black graduation rate of just 55%, with 49% of Black students being suspended in a given school year.

When you add in the fact that at that time, incidents leading to those suspension could be and often were prosecuted as misdemeanors under Florida law; school-yard fights, back-talk or even dress code violations could end up resulting in criminal charges.

Changing these kinds of policies so minority students are disciplined instead of arrested, and at a rate and with outcomes similar to white students is arguably as much or even more important to the content they are learning.

Especially given one cannot get the same education if one is swept into the criminal justice system simply for being a kid.

All this to say that Hayward’s choice of slogan was not merely a good one — in terms of actualizing the goal of expanding and strengthening racial justice, it might just be the best one.

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