When the whistle blew for the athletes to play for another quarter, Cross says she dared the woman to say the word again. The player, who hasn’t been publicly identified, did, Cross alleges. Cross punched her.
The college junior tweeted her frustration about other players not facing consequences, and disappointment in how her university and the USA South Athletic Conference didn’t acknowledge the racism she said she experienced.
Cross, an Illinois native, apologized for her actions, but the hurt from her alleged experience appeared to linger in an interview with ABC 11.
“I was just very, very upset,” she said in a trembling voice. “I’ve never been called a n—– to my face.”
Cross’s reaction to the other player is a stark reminder about the expectations attached to being a Black student athlete, the divided culture upon which athletic programs are built and a glimpse at what can be expected from future generations of Black athletes, scholars told The Washington Post.
To react or not to react
Black athletes at the college and professional levels have a history of being on the front lines of racial tension with the presumption that they will endure racial abuse, said Louis Moore, associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University.
Race-based taunts from players and fans sometimes became physical for athletes such as Jackie Robinson.
Robinson’s ability to not react to the years of mistreatment was a selling point for his signing to the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he was physically and verbally assaulted until the president and general manager of the team told him he no longer had to put up with the hazing to prove that Black players belonged in baseball.
The second Black man to break color lines in Major League Baseball, Larry Doby, reached a breaking point in 1957 when a white player threw a ball that nearly hit Doby’s head. Doby responded with a left hook that dropped the other player and prompted Black-run newspaper Call and Post to print that his punch helped Black baseball players to be “completely emancipated.”
But the lingering effects of grinning and bearing it through racialized torment still haunts Black athletes, Moore said.
“The expected reaction is to be like Jackie — to turn the other cheek and not to punch back. It’s a very rare moment when this happens,” he said of Cross’s action.
Moore said incidents such as what Cross alleges can be harder to prove if there’s no video, leading people to fall into their natural inclination of not believing the person who does the accusing.
White halls and Black players
Black athletes on college campuses often started out never being fully integrated into the largely White schools for which they are playing and earning money, experts say.
That level of separatism doesn’t exist today, but the remnants of those times lurk at institutions that wanted to reap the rewards of having Black players without acknowledging their humanity or erasing their own bigotry, according to Theresa Runstedtler, associate professor of history at American University.
Up until about the 1980s, Black male student athletes were housed in separate dorms and provided tutors because school officials had low expectations for them, she said.
Before that, students and universities were publicly decrying affirmative action and the harms they thought it would bring to traditionally White campuses, yet many didn’t mind altering standards to accommodate the Black athletes who could drum up serious revenue, Runstedtler said.
Black players often had nowhere to escape their Blackness despite their physical prowess. Despite modern-day, conservative notions that sports are politically neutral ground, that has never been the case for Black college and professional athletes who want to step into the unsteady field of student activism, she said.
“Your scholarship is never really guaranteed. You are disposable to universities,” she said. “Depending on what kind of risk you’re willing to take to speak out against things, you always have to calculate that risk.”
The William Peace women’s basketball team stood behind Cross when it collectively decided to sit out a championship game, saying it doesn’t feel like their voices have been heard.
“This situation is much bigger than basketball,” the team said in a statement. “The systemic racism the team has first hand experienced in the past several weeks is an issue that needs to be addressed not only within William Peace University but in the USA South Conference as a whole.”
Cross didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Tom Hart, commissioner for the USAC, said in a statement that the organization’s expectation of respect for diversity and equality have resulted in no documented instances of racial harassment that have had to be arbitrated in at least five years.
Cross’s suspension was determined by the NCAA rule for fighting. The half of the game she missed reflected the time she would’ve missed by being removed for fighting if the game officials had witnessed her punch, he said.
“The alleged racial slur would have had no impact on the suspension Lauryn would serve due to the punch she threw and landed on the unsuspecting student athlete,” he said. “However, upon learning of the alleged racial slur, the USA South immediately contacted Mary Baldwin University officials, our supervisor of basketball officiating and William Peace officials and asked for the incident to be investigated.”
Tom Byrnes, Mary Baldwin University director of athletics, told The Washington Post in a statement that review of video from the game and conversations with courtside witnesses led their athletics officials to determine that their player didn’t use the racial slur or provoke the punch against her.
The road ahead
Black students organizing against racial injustice and prejudice has morphed from the late 1960s and 1970s, when many staged protests on podiums or decided to sit out games to protest their conditional integration into schools, said Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
The William Peace women’s basketball team is holding school and athletic leaders accountable for the promises many institutions made over the summer about committing to diversity and inclusion after racial uprisings in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, she said.
Team members launched a petition Wednesday that gained nearly 350 signatures by Thursday morning. They outlined demands for faculty, staff and the athletic department, in addition to suggestions for how suspensions should be handled.
The renewed activism fueled by last summer is probably going to be a game changer for how student athletes go about asserting their stances, especially if they move collectively like the William Peace team.
“There is work to do. There is always going to be work to do,” Davis said. “Words are easy sometimes. These institutions have deep roots and foundations that are not easy to trouble. It’s a lot easier to craft a statement or start a book club, but it’s harder to rethink systems of oppression.”