Player gets booed for upholding personal convictions

[hollodero]

(06-05-2018, 10:23 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Well, maybe.  My good friend (whom I consider my younger brother) is a black man.  Every February, when black history month happens in the US, he always says "If you really want to know black history, just hang with me for a month.".   I've known him for over 25 years, dating back to before we were teammates in Semi-Pro ball.  We still speak on at least a weekly basis.  My point about mentioning this relationship is this;  The only way to truly know the person that is different from you, is to actually get to know them.

He actually despises "Black history month",  he says "every month is black history month", and follows up with "we don't need a month of our own, we just want to share all months..

I get that - I guess. I don't know anything about being black in the US or elsewhere, or about being gay. I believe I know that there's still much hatred and rejection going around for both groups. In many respects though, I think the black experience and the gay experience are quite different - starting with the obvious that no black person was ever accused of having made a life choice by being black. With being gay, there are many other battles to fight, and the battle for acceptance is not just with society, but starts within the family. Lack of acceptance has caused a lot of suffering, up to parents rejecting their gay child and other quite sad events, stemming from too little tolerance. Is my perspective.

Now I don't know if soccer jerseys do anything to build up acceptance and ease these pains. I couldn't say, and I couldn't say about black history month and whatnot. I understand the perspective of despising it, interpreting it as someone seeking special attention. The other interpretation would be that all these things can contribute their bit to a better (more understanding... and all these nice things) society that sure still has its problems. Maybe that's naive. But is it really worse than that.

And I guess that's a bit the point for me, by refusing to participate in such an attempt... I think it makes that soccer player unlikeable to me. Especially since it really wouldn't have cost her that much personally to wear them, and also it does have a touch of attention-seeking for a particular group too. But just as I'm not gay nor black, neither am I religious.