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They’re looking at me, like, what is he doing here?
In the middle of an immaculately manicured golf course tucked inside one of Jackson, Mississippi’s, most affluent neighborhoods, a 6-foot-8 Tougaloo College sophomore from Atlanta shared that experience with one of his peers. It just so happens that his peer for this conversation was a 5-foot-11 Millsaps College senior from Livingston, Ala.
There aren’t many ways these two could be more visibly different. A small-town Southern girl and a ball player from the big city. A student from a college founded in 1869 for Black students and a student from a school that didn’t integrate until nearly a century later. A Black man and a White woman.
We can imagine a world where Sincere Simon, the 6’8” Tougaloo College basketball star, and Kayley Stegall, the award-winning Phi Mu Sorority member, never had a real conversation. Actually, we live in one. That’s why the fact that Simon and Stegall joined eight other college students from Jackson State University, Millsaps College, Mississippi College, Jackson State University and Holmes Community College to have conversations about racial healing and equity – during the Sanderson Farms Championship at the Country Club of Jackson no less – is remarkable.
Where conversations happen is often as important as what’s said during those conversations. Sophia Albasini, a senior golfer at Millsaps College, shared her thoughts on the racialization of the sport she loves with Jabin Deyamport, a senior at Mississippi College:
I feel like golf is a very White sport because, one, … it’s very [stereotypical] culture of White people to play golf. But also, golf is not something that a lot of marginalized communities have participated in in the past, just because it’s very expensive. There’s no free way to play golf.
The gentry and green spaces that flank the sprawling campus of the Country Club of Jackson stood in stark contrast to the paucity of possibilities in other parts of Mississippi’s capital city. More than one in four Jackson residents live in poverty, which means that in addition to not being able to afford to play golf, many Jacksonians aren’t afforded the time or space to think about golf. Much of that poverty is racialized because Jackson’s population is more than 80% Black and, as the Equal Justice Initiative aptly points out, “[t]he economic exploitation of African American men, women, and children [that began after emancipation] persisted well into the 20th century, ensnaring several generations in poverty.”
With all of the distance – social, economic and physical – finding common ground can be difficult. However, the five conversations these students had proved that difficult is not impossible. It just requires courage.
These five conversations, and a subsequent series of individual and group conversations about these students’ experiences, are significant parts of the source and substance of the COMMON GOOD JXN campaign that seeks to bring people together to talk plainly and honestly about the impacts of racism – and what it takes for us to heal.
Over the next nine months, we will share sights, sounds and stories from the Sanderson Farms Championship and earlier conversations between students and families from Jackson Public Schools and St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, to demonstrate the power and possibility of racial healing.
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