Despite much progress, university wokeness is not dead. Syracuse University effectively accusing its men’s lacrosse team of glorifying genocide is proof positive of that.
The Syracuse men’s lacrosse team is arguably the best sports program at the university right now, and the team’s defensive coordinator introduced a new mantra to keep the success going: “Burn the boats.” You may recognize this as a popular metaphor that essentially means that there is no going back. It is based on Hernan Cortes burning the ships of his men upon landing in Mexico, leaving the Spanish no possibility of retreating from their conquest. It’s a common metaphor, frequently used by other sports teams, such as the 2012-13 Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL.
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And then a professor at Syracuse, along with a Native American rights attorney, took to the student-run university newspaper, the Daily Orange, to complain about the phrase. The two said the team adopting the mantra was a “nod” to the “brutal massacre, enslavement and colonization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.” They called it “deplorable” and “cruel” for the team to use the phrase. They demanded that the coach be punished and the team be sentenced to sensitivity training, and they said they hope the team fails and loses its games. They outright accused the program of celebrating genocide.
And Syracuse University agreed.
The university legitimized the deranged tirade of a random attorney and a random professor, stepping in to forbid the team from using the mantra moving forward. The university bent the knee under almost no pressure whatsoever from two progressive elites whose ridiculous opinions could be easily ignored, throwing the university’s best sports team under the bus over the benign use of a mantra that has settled into popular culture as a metaphor for not giving yourself the option to give up.
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Perhaps, if the lacrosse team adopted Palestinian terrorist slogans such as “Globalize the intifada,” the university would give it a glowing approval instead.
So long as a university such as Syracuse can be whipped into line by two random progressive complainers, “wokeness” is not dead. Syracuse is operating under it still, and it will until the university stops indulging in insincere struggle sessions and smearing its own students to try to make progressive activist communities feel better about themselves.
