by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
About 100 people gathered outside the SUB on Thursday to protest remarks made by Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry.
DeBerry said on Oct. 26 that his team did not win against Texas Christian University because the team does not have many African-American athletes, stating "Afro-American kids can run very, very well."
He made a public apology the following day.
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F. Michelle Touson, president of the Black Graduate and Professional Students Association at UNM, said she is not accepting his apology.
"By his comments I felt like he marginalized a nation," she said. "He told African-Americans, 'I don't look at you as thinking, feeling, intellectual human beings. I just look at you as basically field hands.' Basically, throw in some black athletes and add water, and there you go."
She passed out shirts printed with the slogan "Apology Not Accepted."
Touson said she was happy with the turnout of the protest, although she had no idea what to expect.
"I haven't slept in days, because I didn't know how this was going to turn out," she said. "I really had no idea if people were going to show up, if they were going to be interested, if the weather was going to be nice - thank you, Mother Nature."
Student Fatuma Saho caught part of the protest.
"It was necessary to protest because it got people who didn't know about Fisher's comments aware of what was happening," Saho said.
Student Jacob Fawcett said protesting was over the top.
"It's out of proportion," he said. "You can't say that one statement from one guy about one race is going to lead to how that school runs as a team," he said.
Professor Finnie Coleman, who spoke at the protest, said DeBerry's comments were, in a sense, nothing new.
"His comments fit in with a long history in the United States where we don't understand why a certain thing is, so we come up with very racist ideas or sexist ideas about why they are so," Coleman said. "We've done that across time. This was just the continuance of a certain strain of arrogance and ignorance."
Hakim Bellamy, a slam poet who performed at the event, said the protest was about something bigger than the comment on the football game.
"We've gotten to a point, as a global community, where we're like, 'Ah, we're OK. There's no more racism. We're past all that,'" Bellamy said. "It's very much alive."
He said DeBerry was naive to have made the comment.
"He obviously didn't know that this was going to happen, that there was going to be this kind of backlash, or he wouldn't have said it, because it wouldn't have been in his best interest to say it," he said.
Bellamy said his poem expressed the idea that words have as much power as you give them.
"Rather than me being upset over somebody calling me a racial slur, I should be more upset with words that are much harder, like 'child prostitution' or 'illiteracy in the United States' or 'poverty' and 'homelessness,'" he said.
Touson said everyone attending Saturday's football game against the Air Force Academy at University Stadium should wear black to protest DeBerry. She wants to let him know he is not allowed to marginalize the accomplishments of African-Americans, she said.
"Black is the color of defiance for most movements," she said. "And everybody's got a black T-shirt, because it's slimming."
