As an African American lacrosse player growing up in a 1970s white suburb of New York, I felt I had to establish acceptance in two very different worlds: The Black spaces of my parents home and their extended family and friends where we enjoyed soul food and listened to Frankie Crocker play Roberta Flack, The Gap Band, and Parliament on stations like WBLS in metro New York. And the larger white spaces where cool meant listening to WPLJ and house parties with little to no food or dancing while enjoying James Taylor, The Allman Brothers, and the Rolling Stones. In the 1970s and early 80s I played lacrosse and spent a great deal of time in high school, and my first two and half years of college (except for African American teammate Matt Holman at SU), trying to be accepted by white teammates who did not revere black culture like the white youth of today. My observation and reflections are that white teammates, including those at SU, ignored, laughed at, or held black culture and people at bay due largely to white privilege –that is; they didn’t need to embrace it for creditability and acceptance. And sadly, many thought because I played a “white” sport that I held the same view about black culture. As a parent of two black children living again in a largely white suburb (with a sizable Hispanic population and small black community), I talk about these cultural challenges with a wife who looks like my mother and dances far better than me. But fortunately for my kids, black culture and “black cool” as one person phrased it is in vogue today. That was not my off field reality growing up nor what I faced as a Black lacrosse player at Syracuse University in the fall of 1983.
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