Morgan Hoffmann, PGA Tour player
It took me a few minutes to gather my thoughts and put something down because I don’t think anybody has the right answer on what to say. There is no right thing to say. You just need to speak from your heart and your own experiences. Everyone in this country has their own experiences about what’s going on.
What I kind of wanted to get across is people need to do their research on the true history in America and what’s really going on. Look into the laws that are actually written down that suppress African-Americans, from how much they get paid to how they can get hired, how the white man has basically taken over everything for its riches. It’s just frustrating because everybody wants it to be America, the land of the free, but is that really what’s going on? I’m so happy that these protests are actually happening now, and people are starting to speak up.
My dad is extremely racist, and I’ve been out of my home since I was 16 on purpose, and I’ve learned what I have on my own. If there’s backlash coming back from that post, then it’s people who don’t understand really what’s going on and were not educated properly on racism in this country, because it hasn’t stopped and it’s frustrating.
I watched a video of somebody making a speech, and they asked a group of people, “Would anybody in this room please stand if you would like to be treated like an African-American is in this country right now?” and nobody stood. And she repeated the question again and nobody stood again. She’s like, “Exactly, you understand exactly what’s going on in this country but you’re not willing to do anything about it because you’re comfortable where you are.”
I think we’ve all fallen into that. It’s a really hard subject to talk about, but it needs to be talked about and pushed in this country. For women’s rights, black rights, minority rights. Anybody with a platform. A lot of basketball players and football players are doing a great job, but obviously the PGA Tour is mainly white Americans. If we were to speak up more, then that would be huge I think.