Kyle King
Composition
101
Lora
Strey
Hockey can be a brutal sport that for sure just go to
YouTube and search "NHL big hits" and you'll see what I mean. Hockey
can be brutal in other ways other then physically as well, mentally,
emotionally, but the one that is really bad would be how brutal it is to be a
non-white person who doesn’t speak English in hockey.
In the article Some Thoughts On Mercy Ross Gay says
"And not only black people laugh at such
jokes. Everyone does, because everyone knows."(Some Thoughts
On Mercy) He talking about a skit done by Key and Peele were
President Obama has a little run in with the police. The same way non-white
people are sometimes discriminated against by the police, they are also victims
of discrimination in hockey.
The caption of this picture just shows
how much discrimination is still in hockey. (Berkshire)
Another example
of discrimination and blatant racism came in 2012 when a white player asked
P.K. Subban, a black player, "if he had slipped on a banana peel."
(arcticicehockey) You can try to defend it whatever way you want, but that is
just a racist comment plain and simple.
What about if you are of a different
nationality? Would you be discriminated against for speaking a different
language? Thanks to an article by counterpunch.org we know that in fact they
are discriminated against as well. In a study done by an American Sociologist,
David Marple, he took players the U.S., Russia, Sweden, and Canada he broke
apart into Quebec verses the rest of Canada. The findings showed "French-speaking
players were more productive yet played fewer games."(counterpunch) This makes
very little sense to me, wouldn’t you want the most productive players on the
ice? The only explanation for it would be that people don’t want “F***in’
Frogs”(counterpunch) to play on their team.
If you thought that discrimination in
hockey didn’t happen before you read this you must have lived under a rock.
Hockey has come a long way since its beginning but it still has a long way to
go if it doesn’t want to be the “white person” sport. One more thing, wouldn’t
it be more profitable if hockey were a sport with more diversity? That’s just
my opinion I guess.
Works Cited
"Evander Kane, P.K.
Subban and the Abundance of Racism in the NHL." Arctic Ice Hockey.
6 Dec. 2013. Web.
"The Untold Story of
Discrimination in Professional Hockey Against French-Speaking Players." CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.
Ed. Jeffrey St. Clair. 13 Dec. 2010. Web.
Berkshire, Andrew.
"Vancouver Sun Calls Jordan Subban "Dark Guy in the
Middle"" Vancouver Sun Calls Jordan Subban "Dark Guy in the
Middle" 24 Sept. 2014. Web. 8 Oct. 2014.
