More than a dozen students, parents, and coaches from Dominion High School in Sterling (and one particularly impressive middle schooler from Seneca Ridge) turned out to the most recent Board of Supervisors meeting to ask the board to move up plans to turf the last four high schools in the county without artificial turf on their athletic fields. DHS isn't programmed to get a turf field until 2023, according to the latest school Capital Improvement Plan. The middle schooler stood on her tip-toes the whole time she was speaking to reach the mic on the podium.
Renss Greene
Seeing all those teenagers show up on a school night to brigade the Board of Supervisors with their requests during the public input session was one of my favorite things I've ever seen in a boardroom. You very seldom see people in team hoodies and sneakers in the halls of power. It must have been an intimidating thing to do for those students, and several of them were as well-spoken and moving as anyone I've seen there.
But there was one sour note, and it left a bad odor around something that was otherwise a very fine demonstration of democracy in action.
A few things to keep in mind:
Loudoun County just elected its first-ever black supervisors, Supervisor Koran Saines and Chairwoman Phyllis Randall.
Immediately before the public input session, the board approved and presented a resolution recognizing Black History Month. In fact, before she joined the board, Phyllis Randall helped start the board's annual tradition of passing such a resolution, and up until this year she also wrote that resolution.
Turfed fields are not a civic crisis. Yes, it is unfair that four of Loudoun's high schools (Dominion, Heritage, Freedom, and Briar Woods) have grass instead of turf. It makes things more difficult on the teams, particularly when bad weather keeps them off their field and forces them to jostle for time in the gym or at another school's field. Then, of course, during the season they go play on turfed fields and aren't used to the surface, which does make a difference. I do sympathize. But as problems go, let's agree that this is a pretty civilized one.
Things were going great until the very last speaker on the topic of turfed fields (an adult) took the podium. I won't share his name here, although it's a matter of public record. And from here I'll just copy my transcription of the recording:
“It’s kind of telling that we’re here tonight when we celebrated Black History Month, because this is about inequity, it is about disenfranchising communities, it is about putting our kids in a position where they feel less important than others.”
And looking Loudoun's first black chairwoman dead in the eye:
“I think this board seriously should consider the message that it’s sending the young kids there about how important that they are compared to the rest of the communities within Loudoun County, because what you’re saying to them is that they’re not, and I don’t think that’s the message that the board is trying to say—especially, Madame Chairwoman, tonight, when a resolution was passed to honor Black History Month and what that means to your community and Loudoun County.”
Kudos to you, sir, for going with "your community" and stopping short of saying "you people." There was another speaker after him, speaking on a different topic, but I'm not sure the sound carried. All the air was gone from the room.
Loudoun's first black supervisors, Supervisor Koran Saines and Chairwoman Phyllis Randall, read a resolution proclaiming Black History Month in Loudoun. Renss Greene
Of course, this person wasn't trying to be offensive. He was trying to be persuasive, and what's worse, he was arguing for a good cause with the very purest of intentions. But he has implicitly equated the trials of a student athlete struggling to overcome a grass field and the trials of a black people throughout history struggling to overcome centuries of oppression and discrimination.
To her credit, Randall barely flinched.
It's a frustrating, tragic irony that the specter of racism will overshadow any point he was trying to make about anything as innocent as high school sports. (I did not include his comments in the relevant Loudoun Now article for just that reason—it would only mean one person distracts from those students' story.) Odds are, if you ask him about it, that speaker will rail against racism. He had good intentions. But to borrow extremely selectively from last year's Between the World and Me by The Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates:
“Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
This guy is not individually responsible for every bad thing that has happened or will happen to minorities because of race, and there's no need for everyone to walk around with a crippling sense of guilt and mincing, exaggerated political correctness. But we have to be a little cognizant of the weight of our words and conscious of the scope of America's current and historic problems with race and other social inequality, especially those of us in the public eye. This speech was too heavy an axe, and it slipped and cut both ways: it hurt the argument for turfing those fields by distracting from it; and by its careless logic, it perpetuated the brusque indifference and thoughtless inattention of well-meaning people which allow social inequality to persist well into the 21st century.
As the student athletes of Dominion, Heritage, Freedom, and Briar Woods high schools—and millions of minority people of every stripe in America—can attest, neither of these struggles are over. But hey, at least by 2024, there will be a turf field at Dominion High School.
Renss Greene