‘Am I part of the team?’: Black softball players excluded from NC high school’s team banners
At the start of the high school softball season, Orange High School parents put up four banners on the fence outside the softball field. The banners had the girls’ individual names and numbers, and were supposedly commemorating the senior players.
But there are seven seniors on the team. Not four.
It turned out that one girl’s sign was also there, it just didn’t have holes. It meant that all five white girls were recognized from the start, while the two Black girls and their families were left out of the planning and commemoration.
“It’s not like these parents did not know who my child was,” Camelia Latta-Harshaw, the mother of one of the Black players, says. “They have been playing T-ball together. They have been in the county. Three of them have been in the same elementary school with her.”
Latta-Harshaw was informed about the situation on the way to the game by her oldest daughter. When the mother confronted one of the parents who organized the banners, saying it was racist, she was told it was simply because Latta’s daughter wasn’t on the team in the fall. But no team technically existed before tryouts in February, when Latta’s daughter made the team. One of the involved parents did not respond to requests for comment.
Latta-Harshaw says her daughter also got very little playing time during the game. While Latta-Harshaw understands that it happens — both daughters played on school and travel softball teams for years — the combination affected her child’s self-esteem.
“‘It’s almost like, am I part of the team?’” Latta-Harshaw said, reiterating her conversation with her daughter after the game. “‘Why am I here?’”
Although Latta-Harshaw says the parents of the other softball players dismissed Latta-Harshaw’s accusations of racism, it wouldn’t be the first time the school has reported racist incidents. In the 2016-2017 school year, Orange County Schools recorded 70 racist incidents in their middle and high schools. They stopped collecting this data after it was obtained by local news outlets. Neighboring Chatham County made national headlines in recent weeks after middle school students held a mock “slave auction.”
“These small little microaggressions against students of color are happening routinely at our schools, and we fix the single incident,” says LaTarndra Strong, the president of the Northern Orange NAACP and Hate-Free Schools Coalition. “But we’re not changing the culture of the school to eliminate these as experiences for students.”
Racism in softball isn’t uncommon, either. Last year, a Hillside High School player was told by umpires to cut her hair during a game. As an elementary school student, a travel team coach deemed Latta-Harshaw’s daughter “uncoachable.” A.J. Andrews, a professional player and the first woman to receive the prestigious Rawlings Gold Glove Award, told Popsugar in June that she experienced hardship growing up as a Black girl in a predominantly white sport.
“I don’t think it’s an assumption to look at softball and say, ‘Oh, there’s not a lot of Black representation,’” Andrews said. “All you have to do is turn on the TV.”
Since that first game, the school has taken it upon itself to pay for a poster of Latta-Harshaw’s daughter. While she was told by other parents it’d take months for the poster to be planned and arrive, the team got it about a week after her daughter took the picture for it.
Latta-Harshaw says she believes the head coach of the team, Johnny Barefoot, was not informed about the posters, based on his conversations with her and her daughter. At a recent team meeting, she says he told parents repeatedly that anything for the students had to go to the coaches first. The principal, Jason Johnson, has also called Latta-Harshaw to apologize. Johnson has not provided a comment as of Thursday.
It shouldn’t have to be spelled out: if you are celebrating some students, it’s your duty to celebrate them all. It also shows how race divides: not just through blatant acts of hate and violence, but through subtle snubs piled on over time. Even in small, close-knit communities, things like this keep people separated.
Latta-Harshaw says they should have considered the impact the snub would have on the members of the team who were left out, but feels they didn’t. She says that she hasn’t received an apology from the parents, nor has her daughter heard apologies from her teammates.
“Think about how your child would feel if she walked up there and didn’t see herself,” Latta-Harshaw says.
This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 9:32 AM with the headline "‘Am I part of the team?’: Black softball players excluded from NC high school’s team banners."
