A professor at Ohio State has posted a groveling apology in Inside Higher Ed, confessing his racism and vowing to repent. His offense? A previous piece titled “Why America Needs College Football.”
The subhead of the apology declares that Matthew Mayhew was apologizing for his previous piece and was “beginning a long process of antiracist learning.” Mayhew apologizes for the “hurt, sadness, frustration, fatigue, exhaustion and pain this article has caused” and says that this is the beginning of a “very long process” of anti-racist learning.
In what reads like a hostage note from someone held in a North Korean prison, Mayhew states that words such as “distraction” and “cheer” serve to “erase the present painful moments within the nation and especially the Black community” and that he is unforgivably a “white man haunted by his ignorance.” The horribly racist piece Mayhew wrote to prompt this apology was the suggestion that college football could provide a distraction from the global pandemic that threw millions into unemployment.
In an astounding turn of irony, Mayhew’s apology is more racist than his original piece. He states that “no one should ever put their bodies on the line for entertainment,” incidentally calling for the end of football (and most other sports). But more importantly, he ignores that it was college athletes who wanted college football to return in the first place.
It was college football players, including black football players, who wanted the season to return. This includes Mississippi State star Kylin Hill, who didn’t want football canceled because of the virus but threatened to sit out the season if Mississippi didn’t remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag. In his atonement, Mayhew started his anti-racist journey by depriving black college football players like Hill of their agency.
Mayhew turns black athletes, who have used their voice to push for their colleges to let them play the football season, into nothing more than “black bodies,” who apparently are forced into playing football because of people like him. This twisted idea of anti-racism is pushed by charlatans such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, who get rich repackaging their own racism to sell to businesses.
One can only hope that Mayhew’s apology is born of spinelessness in the face of pushback rather than a genuine epiphany that he is unknowingly racist. After all, his original piece was a great account of the isolation and division brought on by a pandemic in an election year. But whether it’s cowardice or a conversion, his apology is another drop in the bucket for a toxic ideology moving quickly through our institutions.
Unless he’s just trolling everyone, in which case — well done, sir!
