Safe harbour in storm of violence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/07/2016 (3370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s tempting to say the difference is, quite literally, black and white.

But Winnipeg Blue Bombers cornerback Chris Randle says the disparity between being a black man in Canada and being a black man in the United States goes even further than that, transcending colour entirely.

“I feel safer up here in the sense that the people up here don’t see colour at all,” Randle said Monday after practice at Investors Group Field. “Colour is just not an issue up here as far as I can tell.

“And colour is still an issue where I’m from in the United States — as we’ve seen again with these videos.”

“These videos,” of course, are from last week’s police slayings of black men in Baton Rouge, La., and a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., that once again inflamed racial tensions that are never far from the surface.

Those deaths led to nationwide protests, which in turn led a deranged gunman to take advantage of a Black Lives Matter protest Thursday in Dallas, targeting white police officers, killing five, and prompting editorials across the U.S. calling for calm while expressing fears the crisis is spiralling out of control.

While they are far removed from the situation at the moment, the worsening violence has been watched closely at Investors Group Field, where almost half the Blue Bombers’ active roster — 18 of the 44 that were on last week’s game-day roster — are African-Americans.

Randle — who grew up in the racial powder keg of Oakland, Calif. — had been among the most active on Twitter the past week, tweeting and retweeting his outrage at the violence.

“I just want to see equal justice for everybody,” said Randle. “All lives should matter. But in order for all lives to matter, black lives should matter as well.”

Randle grew up poor and was the first person in his family to attend college, parlaying an ability to play football into what was a ground-breaking moment for his entire family.

It’s a path out of poverty. It’s also misleading: for every black man such as Randle who was able to use professional sports to get an education and find income security, there are thousands of others whose careers stall short of the pro level and return them to the streets they started from.

“America is known as the land of the free and home of the brave,” said Randle, “but in certain areas of the country, you grow up with a different mentality than that. You grow up thinking, ‘How am I going to survive today? How am I going to get through today?’ or ‘How I’m going to get this meal?’

“And so opportunities for certain people are different than for others.”

The Canadian Football League has long been regarded as a safe harbour for African-Americans. The CFL had black quarterbacks going all the way back to Bernie Custis in 1951, and the likes of Warren Moon and Condredge Holloway had been tearing up the CFL and winning Grey Cups for decades before Doug Williams became the first black starting QB in the Super Bowl in 1988.

Winnipeg became a permanent home for more than a few African-Americans who came here to play football only to find they felt more at home in a foreign country than they did in the United States.

The likes of such former Bombers greats Willard Reaves, Rod Hill and James Murphy called Winnipeg home long after their careers were over. The attraction of this city as a safe and stable place for a black man to raise a family is just as strong today.

Linebacker Maurice Leggett became a full-time Winnipegger in the past year, bringing his wife and son to the city in what Leggett says could become a permanent move.

“I have no address in the U.S. anymore,” he said. “We’ve talked about (moving to Winnipeg permanently). And I’m actually trying to purchase a house up here right now — I’ve got someone looking for me.

“And so maybe, depending on how long I’m here, we might settle here. I’d like to become a dual citizen.”

So what would make a black man from Pennsylvania want to uproot his family and settle in a foreign country? “It’s peaceful here,” Leggett said. “Winnipeg is a family town, everyone’s nice here, and we can enjoy ourselves and just work on being a family and being better parents to our son.”

Randle says he will always regard the U.S. as his home, but when it comes to race, he feels more at home in Winnipeg.

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“I have a white wife and I don’t see colour at all. It makes no difference to me and I tote that line throughout my life,” he said. “And understanding how I see it, I think people up here see it very similar to me.”

Are we perfect? Not by a long shot. There’s more than a few indigenous groups who would argue Winnipeg isn’t nearly as colour blind as we might appear.

But as racial tensions boil over south of the border in what is shaping up to be a long hot summer, it says some good things about who we are as Canadians that someone thousands of miles from home would feel more at home among us right now.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek