When the PGA Tour resumes its season on June 11 in Dallas, it will end a three-month layoff and try as best it can to get back to normal.
And that’s a shame. As the protests gripping America in the wake of George Floyd’s death have shown, normal is not OK. No one should want to get back to normal.
“Normal” is America’s refusal to acknowledge and dismantle its systemic racism. It infects virtually every corner of our society. In America, Black people are more likely than white people to live in poverty, to attend poorly funded schools, to be arrested and incarcerated, and to be killed by police. Racism affects all people of color, but by nearly every conceivable statistical measure, it disadvantages African Americans most acutely.
Not surprisingly, then, even more than 50 years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., African Americans are still underrepresented in spaces historically reserved for privileged whites: in Congress and on college graduation stages, for example.
And on the PGA Tour. There’s Harold Varner III. There’s Cameron Champ. And of course there’s Tiger Woods. But for every Black player on the PGA Tour, there are dozens of white players.
Golf’s barricades to African-American participation don’t begin at the pro level, of course. Even at the beginner level, golf’s expenses make it exclusive. Even in college, and even at HBCUs, golf is disproportionately white. Michael A. Fletcher reported a theory in an insightful 2018 piece for The Undefeated:
“You have to have access to elite golf to play elite golf,” said Wendell Haskins, former head of diversity for the PGA and founder of Original Tee, a lifestyle brand dedicated to inclusion in golf. “In basketball, let’s say you are a white player from the suburbs. You haven’t been battle-tested until you’ve gone into the inner city and played with some brothers. The same thing goes with golf in reverse. A lot of kids can play golf to an impressive level. But until you’ve played country club golf, under country club conditions, with country club kids, you have not played elite golf.”
And while thousands of Americans protested Floyd’s death and the racist system that allowed it, the PGA Tour’s ranks (and the Tour itself) largely remained silent — even while athletes from other sports offered support to the protestors. “I know why,” Twitter’s @GorseNod offered. “The professional golfer is symbolic, if not the literal embodiment, of the apex beneficiary of systematic racism. To speak out projects the desire to dismantle that system, which can't be done with[out] sacrifices from said beneficiaries. So they're silent.”
These barriers to golf — and, hell, to a dignified existence — aren’t news, of course. We hear about them and see them all the time: a group of Black women harassed on a golf course, or yet another Black man killed in police custody. There are too many examples to keep track of. It’s enough to make you numb, if you let it — so we do. We go numb, and we ignore it. And then it happens again.
To be clear, racism and white nationalism aren’t the same thing. White nationalists are Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and sometimes Congressmen who espouse the inherent superiority of white people — and the inherent inferiority of everyone else. But a system that is racist creates preferred outcomes for one race above others, even without the knowing participation of all that race’s members. You don’t have to be a white nationalist to have grown up in a neighborhood with a great school, to have taken lessons at a country club, and to have gone on to play on the PGA Tour. But the fact that nearly everyone with that background is white proves that the system is racist. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t ask for those privileges; the system gave them to you. That doesn’t make you a bad person; it just means that you benefitted from a bad system that disadvantages millions of other people.
The question, then, is not how white people can relinquish that privilege; that can’t be done. The question is how white people can use that privilege to destroy racism and make their privileges — well funded schools, fair treatment from police, and a round of golf without getting harassed — available to everyone.
There are no power centers better positioned in golf to address that problem than the PGA Tour. And as the most visual example of golf’s white-dominated landscape, the PGA Tour’s responsibility to address racism in golf is unique.
This responsibility demands both deference and commitment. On the one hand, disadvantaged communities are uniquely positioned to explain what the priorities of any effort to dismantle racism should be — and those communities should be listened to. Coincidentally, several stops on the PGA Tour’s revamped 2020 schedule are in cities that have been touched by protests: Dallas, Detroit, Columbus, and Minneapolis (coincidentally, the city where Floyd died) all will host PGA Tour events before the end of July. There will never be a better time to begin meeting with those communities’ leaders and learning what can be done to help; and at least in Minneapolis, there will never be a more unavoidable time to confront racism in golf.
On the other hand, Black people don’t bear the responsibility to dismantle racism; white people created it, so white people are ultimately responsible for destroying it. And it seems likely that those conversations would confirm that throwing a few bucks at the First Tee — or whatever the PGA Tour could suggest it’s doing to combat racism in golf — isn’t going to cut it. The Tour needs to be prepared to do a lot more. We all do.
I don’t have the answers. And even if the PGA Tour begins reaching out to communities that have been historically shut out from golf and earnestly listens to them, those conversations won’t produce all the answers either. Golf’s exclusionary culture has roots in policies far outside the control of the game’s leaders: poverty, education, and employment opportunities among them.
The PGA Tour can’t solve those problems on its own. It’s not expected to. But it can be part of solving them. And if the anger and frustration on display since George Floyd died proves anything, it’s that white people haven’t done enough. Merely not being a white nationalist isn’t enough, because racism survives not on hatred but on indifference.
For golf, and for the rest of American society, ending racism requires a proactive commitment — and this overdue moment demands that we begin now.
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