Blake referred to an encounter of his own, when he was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by New York police in a case of mistaken identity in 2015. “I was shouting about it for years, and Colin Kaepernick was kneeling about it,” he said. “The difference when this happened to George Floyd was that it was so graphic, so brutal to be watching this murder take place in such a nonchalant manner. My incident awakened the people who were in my circle, but I feel that [Floyd’s killing] opened the eyes of America, especially white America. Now it isn’t just the Black community screaming about this issue. But I agree that it’s losing steam, and I don’t know if everyone is committed to doing the work of holding police accountable.”
Fischbein suggested that the tougher conversations are more likely to happen at Harvard now than when she was an undergraduate. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been on campus,” she said. “But having remained involved with the Harvard athletic community has facilitated conversations that I’ve never had, where we’re actually talking about what it’s like to be part of a community of color on a campus, what it’s like to be an athlete of color, and what that means for the overall health and well-being of that athlete and their contributions to their team. Those topics that might have been discussed on the back of the bus on the way to a game, or perhaps at an alumni event, are now part of the conversation about what it means to be an athlete at Harvard.”
Granderson asked whether the panelists had felt pressure to be what he called the “super negro.”
