I considered not writing about my son’s experience playing soccer this winter. I didn’t want to turn a positive —  children competing, learning teamwork and having fun — into a negative, experiencing racial biases in white suburban communities in the Pioneer Valley. I didn’t want to discolor the amazing work that my son’s soccer coaches put into not only teaching our children the sport of soccer but teaching our children what it means to be cared for and supported, and to do the same for their teammates.

I love having my sons play for Paper City Soccer, Holyoke’s soccer team, and I didn’t want to do anything to tarnish their experience on the team and our experience in the city we love.

But keeping quiet allows the ugliness of racial biases to go unaddressed, and I didn’t want to do that either. Like the city of Holyoke, many children on our soccer team are Latino, especially Puerto Rican. Our coach switches between speaking Spanish and English as he coaches, and our players also inventively and effortlessly switch languages while on the field.

From the spectators, our parents call out in two languages, too. Our children, like those parents in the audience, come in many shades of color. I think we represent best what a community can look like, where ethnic and cultural diversity finds a way of not only tolerating each other but celebrating each other. We’re friends.

Yet we also see the uglier side of when we travel to the white suburbs. We see referees fixate on children of color, calling them for endless fouls when they simply touch their white competitors. We see referees blatantly not call similar fouls on white players when they hack and kick at our athletes of color.

Among the spectators, we hear parents talk about our players as being “too rough” and our parents as being “too loud.” All the stereotypes we fight against come out of these white parents’ mouths as effortlessly as some of our children speak two languages.

We saw one white woman from Northampton walk up to a father, a person of color, and clap her hands in his face because she disliked how loud he was being. She did this in front of an audience of white people, none of whom did anything to defend the man, who didn’t respond to the woman’s aggression. I think he knew better than to call out a white woman in a white community.

My wife, who saw this woman’s aggression, walked up to her and said how dare she do that to another person, at which point the woman’s husband got into my wife’s face and said she was disrupting the soccer match.

These are just a few of the things we have seen as parents on a diverse team like Holyoke. We have seen white parents behave badly in endless ways, and it’s always with the pretense that there is something inherently wrong with our team. My wife and I would come home from games shocked at some people’s behavior.

As white people, we have been lucky not to experience such behaviors in our lives. Most white people are oblivious to such biases because they are either the ones thoughtlessly committing them or they live in communities where there are very few people of color.

I remember watching a Puerto Rican parent telling his crying son that he needed to stop touching his white competitors because if he did, the refs were going to call a foul. Unintentionally, the father was sending the message that his son was part of the problem. Yet I also understood that the parent knows this experience and was giving his son some important advice about placating the aggressor to protect himself.

Feeling so incensed by this unfairness, I started calling out to players to “Use your body!” as they played, saying it loud enough for white parents to hear. I wanted our players to know that there is nothing wrong with their bodies and nothing wrong with their presence. The problem is a white problem.

Like I said, I thought about not writing this piece because I don’t want to tarnish the amazing work Holyoke’s coaches do for our children and the incredible experience our children have playing in such a diverse community, but I think other white communities need to be aware of things they don’t see.

And it’s not just soccer. The same happens in other sports my children play. During last year’s baseball season, one white community actually refused to play in Holyoke because they didn’t want to drive into our city. And our young players knew it — how do you think that makes them feel about themselves?

At one game, my wife and I tried to tell a white father from Northampton what was happening. He smiled and said something about “parents being out of control,” implying the “out of control” ones were from Holyoke. Like the refs, his attention was fixated on the parents and children of color and he was unable to see the bad behaviors of the white community he lived in.

Like so many others in his community, he couldn’t see himself or his biases. Maybe writing this can change that a little.

Patrick O’Connor is a parent who lives in Holyoke.]]>