Changing the Finish Line: Ending the Practice of Holding Back Successful People of Color

Photo: C. Morgan Engel/NCAA Photos (Getty Images)

For the LSU Tigers, Louisiana State University’s women’s basketball team, April 2nd should have been a truly triumphant day. It was the day they won the NCAA national championship, wowing spectators and making history. A record-breaking event, the match saw the majority-Black team score the most points ever in a women’s championship game as well as the most points scored at halftime, accomplishments that secured them their first ever championship victory.

The excitement quickly soured, however, when First Lady Jill Biden, who had been attending the game, invited the Iowa Hawkeyes, the runners-up, to the White House to celebrate alongside the Tigers. LSU’s star forward, Angel Reese, was quick to call this “a joke.” After all, celebration at the White House is a gift reserved for the winning team, and there was certainly no reason to suddenly break that tradition. Many saw this strange deviation as a sign that the rules were being changed due to the race of the victors, suggesting that if the predominantly white Hawkeyes had won, the Tigers would not have been given the same invitation. 

Regardless of Biden’s intentions in extending the invite, her casual rule-change highlights an existing problem in America, that being a cultural drive, stemming from ingrained societal and systemic racism, to hold back people of color and prevent them from basking in their accomplishments. And it goes beyond sports. Famously, a Mississippi school was exposed for trying to add more valedictorians after two Black students achieved valedictorian and salutatorian status. In that instance, parental uproar caused the school to reevaluate its criteria for determining who became valedictorian, at which point two white students were named co-valedictorian and co-salutatorian. Though the parents and school district stated that this was simply a matter of math and metrics, many involved thought the real motivation was a desire to reduce racial fallout at the expense of Black students. It wouldn’t be the first time something of that nature had happened either; multiple lawsuits were filed in Mississippi alone over racial discrimination in naming of valedictorians. This is not an isolated incident, but rather an example of yet another attempt to withhold achievements from people of color.

Unfortunately, sports and education are not the final frontiers for this type of discrimination. People of color are systematically prevented from succeeding or reaping the rewards of their efforts in practically every aspect of life. For example, professional attainment remains an issue for many minorities. Studies have found that Black workers are consistently overrepresented in entry-level positions and underrepresented in higher paying roles, suggesting that they are not being promoted in equivalent amounts to their caucasian counterparts. Additionally, people with ethnic names are less likely to receive callbacks for interviews, despite being fully qualified for the roles they’ve applied to. What this means for people of color is that, regardless of work ethic and experience, occupational success remains a difficulty due the efforts of society to hold them back. And with that comes a plethora of financial issues and general discontentment, one that feeds further maliciousness and widens the cultural gap.

To me, what makes these situations truly appalling is the casualness with which they occur. In the case of LSU, Jill Biden was never prompted to invite the Hawkeyes at all. She did so with open disregard for tradition and, when called out, didn’t bother to apologize. It was only after receiving immense backlash that her press secretary, Vanessa Valdivia, released a generic statement. Biden herself remained silent on the issue, seemingly indifferent to the pain she had caused the Black championship winners. Her apathy toward the plight of the players as the First Lady set a precedent, and other officials felt no need to address it. Similarly, when West Point High School officials decided to make changes to the valedictorians, no one bothered to call the families of the Black valedictorian and salutatorian to inform them of the change. They simply expected the people of color involved to accept it. In 2023, one might expect a little more class, and yet, for wronged Black people, there seems to be virtually no restitution.

So why are issues of this nature not being addressed? For one, there are few repercussions for these attempts to undermine success on a racial basis. There’s no law against withholding a promotion or sending out additional invites, leaving only society to hold perpetrators accountable, something it rarely does. Additionally, the system leans into a manufactured self-doubt that many minorities experience. Research shows that young people from marginalized backgrounds who grew up believing in the idea that hard work breeds success have lower self esteem as they age, likely due to the fact that our society does not reward people of color in the same way it rewards caucasians. By partaking in systemic justification, minorities often fail to see the differences between their treatment and that of white counterparts, preventing them from ever speaking out. 

Ultimately, it’s clear that what happened to the LSU Tigers is not anomalous or rare. It’s a symptom of a cultural disease that preys on the anxieties of marginalized people and forces them to accept societal mistreatment as a fact of life. It seeks to hold them back, keep them from achieving their true potential, and undermine everything they accomplish. As a society, we must become more aware of what’s going on around us. We can’t let incidents like these go unaddressed and assume that the intentions of everyone involved were pure. It’s our duty to call racial injustice out, whether or not those who have perpetrated it are aware of what they were doing. 

If we allow people like Jill Biden, people who hold immense power, to carry on as they do and sweep things under the rug, then our problems only become worse. LSU may have won, but if we continue to ignore this cultural dilemma, our society just lost–big time.