There was a lot of division in the name of unity this weekend.
At President Brodhead’s Homecoming Ball on Friday night, alumni, seniors and particularly intrepid underage tricksters found themselves cordoned off in the I.M. gym in search of alcohol. Separate from the freshmen both spatially and temporally (why doesn’t anyone ever issue a memo telling the freshmen not to come right at 9 p.m.?), the old folks were given ample incentive to defy the spirit of reunion.
Enjoined from drinking, the freshmen were to enjoy the dance floor stone cold sober. Enjoined from dancing, the elder of the young adults were to drunkenly interact with one another without the convenience of a dance floor. How do you get sloppy without a d-floor? It’s a ball, people.
In other sequestering news this weekend, the North Carolina Pride festival took place Saturday morning and early afternoon on Duke’s East Campus. Carefully planned not to interfere with the football festivities (or vice versa?), the Pride festival still celebrated its Silver Anniversary (that’s 25, you cretins) with a bang.
Durham bridged some strange binaries with this division-cum-unification scheme. But the Duke-North Carolina Central University football showdown on Saturday night took the cake.
The Blue Devils against the Eagles. Pitting a big ‘ol football band against our more Cameron-suited band. The first Maroon-Blue face-offs, not counting our constant struggle with UChicago to stay in the U.S. News Top 10.
And, to point out the big-ass, racially charged elephant in the room, NCCU is where a certain Crystal Mangum attended school when a certain cadre of Duke lacrosse players came under certain accusations.
I initially thought that little said “Bull City Unity” worse than a historically black university and a historically race-challenged university sending oversized students to pummel one another on the gridiron. Although a lot of cooperation goes into coordinating this game, I just didn’t see diametrically opposed fan bases rooting for diametrically opposed outcomes as a good vehicle for overcoming tensions.
When the Mets and the Yankees play each other, New York doesn’t pass around the peace pipe and resolve all its conflicts. When the Cubs and the White Sox play each other, Michael Barrett punches A.J. Pierzynski. Why should a Duke-NCCU be any different?
Not to mention, football is a much more physical game than baseball. The Blue Devils were literally grabbing the Eagles and forcibly jerking them to the ground. It’s as if President Obama, hoping to strengthen ties with Iran, staged a mock tactical bombing of underground nuclear facilities. Unity, my left foot!
How could adversarial athletic events possibly bridge racial and socioeconomic divides?
I turn your attention to “The Secret Game,” a clandestine basketball match between the North Carolina College for Negroes (now NCCU) and the “Duke Navy Medical School” team. In 1944, a full two decades before the Civil Rights Act, the all-black team hosted the all-white team in what a metaphorical gentleman named Jim Crow deemed an illegal racially mixed meeting. The vastly superior Eagles whomped the Blue Devils to the tune of 88-44, but the real loser was unjust division.
In “The Secret Game,” all the participants risked certain arrest, and half of the participants further risked the violent extra-legal “justice” of the Jim Crow system, but they defied the system. With these roots we can see how a football game might be able to bridge some gaps.
Letting a sea of maroon complement our sea of blue in Wallace Wade stadium certainly isn’t a statement to the same degree as defying Jim Crow segregation laws to play basketball. Nor is a football game going to overcome the long, complex history of town-gown and gown-gown tensions.
But we know our team—they always seem to let our FBS opponents make a game of it. And whether black or white, Eagle or Blue Devil, young or old, LGBT or no, biting your nails as Duke fails to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory lets us see our Bull City spirit—or “Bullship”—that brought us to the stands in the first place.
Now that’s what I call unity.
Charlotte Simmons would mock tactical bomb Iran as a show of unity.
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