Coaches and fans at Duke volleyball game needed to stand up to racism

Updated, 9/9/2022: Brigham Young University said Friday that it has found no corroborating evidence of racial slurs at the Aug. 26 Duke-BYU volleyball match. Duke athletics director Nina King, in a statement Friday, said she stands with the Duke volleyball team’s actions.

Any parent would stand up for their child in the face of discrimination, whether in the classroom or on an athletic court. But Rachel Richardson, a Duke volleyball player, did not have her father present on Friday night when the team played Brigham Young University.

During the game, students in the BYU section called Richardson the n-word and other racial slurs while she served. It happened repeatedly to the Black Duke players during the two sets they played on that end of the gymnasium. Although Duke officials alerted BYU and game officials to the issue, the only apparent thing done to stop it was placing a police officer on the bench.

On the bus to the hotel, Richardson and her dad stayed on the phone until 2 a.m. “She was crying and afraid and I wasn’t there to be able to make her feel safe,” Richardson’s father, Marvin, told The News & Observer.

While parents and their players can and do advocate for themselves, it shouldn’t be left up to them to combat racism. In this case, the community — not just fans and game officials, but coaches and staff — failed to take action in the moment and stop the racist remarks.

BYU athletics took 24 hours to address the issue publicly, after Richardson’s godmother brought attention to the harassment on Twitter. In remarks, athletic director Tom Holmoe couldn’t even say the word “racist,” only going as far as to call the harassment “egregious and hurtful slurs.” Richardson shared a written statement on the experience Sunday afternoon, saying Holmoe was “quick to act in a genuine and respectful manner.”

“It is not enough to indicate that you are not racist,” Richardson wrote later on, “instead you must demonstrate that you are anti-racist.”

Coaches and officials could have done so by stopping the match immediately until those slurs were no longer being yelled. Fellow fans in the student section could have confronted their racist peers. It shouldn’t be hard to turn around and tell someone to stop. Or, at the least, it shouldn’t be hard to point out bigots to officials, who said that the game continued because the players could not point out who specifically was yelling slurs, and only punished one person in the end. Yet the people in the audience — presumably other white BYU fans — didn’t do that.

In Richardson’s statement, she noted that she refused to let it stop her from playing, to keep the bigots in the stands from feeling that they’d won. Her perseverance is admirable, but it shouldn’t have been up to her to make that decision on her own, when she was the victim of harassment. Her teammates could have refused to play as this continued. The BYU team could have refused, too. But more importantly, the coaches and referees — the most powerful adults in the room — could have stopped the game until the racist chanters were removed from the gymnasium, pulled the team off the court for safety reasons, or demanded officials do more to intervene.

There are people who will say that rowdy student sections and taunting chants are just part of being an athlete. It’s certainly not the first time a slur has been hurled at a college player with a marginalized identity. None of that makes it right.

It is our duty to call out racism and stamp out this sort of behavior in our communities — not the next day with pointed comments and regrets that it happened, but with action in the moment, difficult as that might be. Young Black women should not have to rely on themselves to confront a crowd harassing them. They should have our support, even if it’s uncomfortable.

This story was originally published August 30, 2022 at 3:48 PM.