CU football players battle stereotypes, racism

B.J. Beatty is no stranger to remarks made about his long, red hair.

“I love my long red hair, obviously, I have it out all the time,” Beatty said. “It’s one of my trademarks. I love having it. When guys make fun of the whole redhead thing, I’ll calmly, but at the same time, let them know how serious I am about it and say something.”

Beatty, a 22-year-old senior ethnic studies major and outside linebacker for the CU football team, said he was born and raised in Hawaii. He often gets responses of shock and confusion when he tells inquiring students at CU that he is 60 percent Polynesian because, as he said, he appears white.

While most students spend a majority of their time focusing solely on school and social endeavors, students like Beatty have athletics as an added responsibility.

As such, some of them sometimes must deal with the stereotypes that come along with being an athlete at a university where, according to the United States Department of Education, 78 percent of undergraduates are white.

While the jokes about his hair bother him, he said the questions and confusion surrounding his ethnicity have been an ongoing source of aggravation.

“I’ve gotten California, Texas, I’ve gotten Idaho, Iowa,” Beatty said. “I’ve gotten, ‘I thought all Polynesians were dark and bigger.’”

It is perhaps because of the relative lack of diversity at CU that some of students feel that they are sometimes regarded solely as “the athlete.”

Anthony Perkins, a 21-year-old senior double majoring in integrative physiology and business administration, who plays safety for the CU football team, said that often, the prevailing viewpoint regarding female and male CU students of color is that he or she is an athlete.

“I think that CU, as a school, is predominantly a white school and that’s definitely something you notice,” Perkins said. “When you see someone else that’s black or not white, automatically, your first instinct is he must be an athlete, or she must be an athlete, and that’s something that’s not ideal. I feel that there are some preconceived ideas that people do get in their head.”

Kendrick Celestine, a 22-year-old junior sociology and ethnic studies major, who plays wide receiver, said he is also often frustrated by the athlete stereotype.

“The only thing that really gets to me, like me being on the team, is that, let’s say I meet somebody on campus and they don’t even know me but they’ll look at me and be like, ‘basketball player? Football player?’” Celestine said. “Why do I have to be that guy?”

Despite this, Celestine said his experience at CU has been a positive one. The wide receiver said that his coaches and teammates both played big parts in making him enjoy his time as a student.

As a freshman, Celestine recalls what were called “accountability groups,” in which groups of 15 teammates were assigned to a member of the coaching staff to have dinners and hold discussions about more than just football.

“We used to go to the coach’s houses, and we used to have dinner,” Celestine said. “And they also grouped us up in like accountability groups of 15, and we just talked about life. We would each have a coach or staff and hold a meeting. We would just bring up a subject and talk about it, sometimes giving a summary of how we grew up and getting to know one another on a more personal level.”

Celestine said that his experience at CU with football is vastly different from that of his sports experiences at his high school in Mamou, La., at which he was very much accustomed to racial slurs from both opponents and crowds.

“It was an all-black high school so when we played private all-white schools, oh my God, those games, it was like, where I grew up, it was like living on a plantation, or something,” he said. “It was racial slur after racial slur.”

During his application process to the football team at CU, Celestine said that he had to modify his highlight film because of all the resounding racial slurs directed at him from the crowds at his high school football games.

“On my highlight film, what I had to send here, I had to mute the volume on the game because I was listening, and I just heard ‘don’t throw the ball to that n—‘, so I had to go back and redo the highlights and mute it so you couldn’t hear anything,” Celestine said.

Fortunately, Celestine has had far better experiences with his sports career at CU Boulder.

“It’s a different life out here,” he said. “To be honest with you, my experience moving out here is probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”

Though Beatty has not encountered any racial slurs from either his teammates or staff at CU, he said he has also witnessed incidents of racism and racial slurring directed toward some of his teammates by opponents of other teams.

Beatty recalled a particularly disconcerting moment during a game against Texas last year in October.

“I know that when we played a Texas team last year in October, a couple of them threw out the n-word against some of my teammates,” Beatty said.

It is perhaps unavoidable for ongoing acts of racism and hate to occur toward different ethnic students at CU.

This past weekend, for example, Nigerian student Olubiyi Ogundipe, a 19-year-old economics major, was assaulted in a bias-motivated attack on the Boulder campus.

But for some at least, it is comforting to hear that within the football team, that while still acknowledging differences of background, race and ethnicity, there are absolutely feelings of brotherhood and unity.

“I think that we’re a football team first and I think that at the end of the day, that trumps race, that trumps where you are from, any type of cultural differences that we have,” Perkins said. “At the end of the day, the guy standing next to me, no matter what he looks like, no matter where he’s from, he’s my teammate and he’s my brother.”

For more information on the bias-motivated attack on campus, check out thisCU Independent article.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Neda Habibi at Neda.habibi@colorado.edu.