Sports: BLM in Sports, A Black Hockey Player Shares

When I was 14 years old, I was told by a hockey parent in the stands to “go back to the bush in Africa.” When I was 17, I was screamed at by a fan two feet away from me at a junior hockey game that I should “stick to basketball.” When I was 33, a GM who was looking to sign me asked his team captain if I’d be “bad for team morale” because I was black. These memories are not easy to share with you. But with everything that’s happening in the world right now, I feel like I have to speak up and tell my story. The fact is, I’ve known prejudice my whole life. In 1954, my grandfather, Cecil Fraser, immigrated from Kingston, Jamaica, to Kingston, Ontario. He moved from an almost exclusively black city to one where his family was the only black one in town. His son, Hugh — my father — went to law school in Ottawa and followed him into a career as a lawyer. As a student, Hugh married my mother, Ann, a white student from the Ottawa Valley. In 1976, he was an Olympic sprinter, and he remained the fastest man in Canada for a decade. In 1993, he was appointed as a Provincial Court Judge.  From my grandfather being the first black man to graduate from law school at Queen’s University in 1961, to my family being the only black family in Kingston in the ’60s, to the prejudice my father endured for being in an interracial marriage — my belief was always that what my father and grandfather had had to endure was much worse than anything I’d have to. I was born in 1986. Growing up I felt privileged that my life was easier than theirs, and I was grateful for the racial challenges they had endured so that I didn’t have to. But of course, like I said, I’ve experienced racism throughout my hockey career. As have many black players. This past winter, Akim Aliu, a black former NHL player, spoke out about a couple of incidents that happened to him earlier in his career. In one story, he outed a former coach of his (who was by then coaching in the NHL) for having used the n-word multiple times toward him. He also recounted the story of a team Halloween party where one of the staffers went as Akim Aliu — in blackface and a hockey uniform. Believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the things black players have had to endure in the hockey world -The Players' Tribune